3 posts tagged “developer”

This is one of the best, most comprehensive list of software, tips and tricks I've seen on a single web page which is geared towards development on Mac OS X.  If you're a Mac-based gearhead, it's worth a read.  You'll certainly pick up at least one or two new gems...

If you're a Perl hacker on Max OS X, you probably find yourself referring to POD docs quite a bit.  I usually use TextMate for viewing POD of the current module I'm looking at, (Command-control-p) but TextMate's pod2html viewer only allows one document at a time,  This is often about 5 or 6 too few. The "perldoc" command has sort of a similar issue unless you want to have a large number of terminal windows open.

So if you fall into that category, you'll want to get pod2pdf and its associated libraries.  Unpack and install it[1].  Then, add the following little useful function to your .bash_profile or some script that is executed upon login.

# Convert, cache and open POD docs in Preview.app
podview() {
    # Customize the path to your POD PDF directory
    POD=~/Documents/POD

    module="$@"
    moduledir=`echo $module | sed -E 's/[:\/]+/_/g' \
                            | sed -E 's/^[\._]+//g' \
                            | sed -E 's/\.p[lm]$//g'`
    if [ ! -e "$POD" ]; then
        mkdir $POD
    fi
    if [ ! -e "$POD/$moduledir.pdf" ]; then

        perldoc -T -u $module > $POD/$moduledir
        pod2pdf $POD/$moduledir; rm $POD/$moduledir
    fi
    open -a Preview "$POD/$moduledir.pdf"
}

After that, all you have to do is type "podview Some::Perl::Module" and it will be automatically opened in Preview as a PDF.  In addition, the PDF is cached in ~/Documents/POD (by default) to speed up the process or loading it or even finding it with, say, QuickSilver?

[1] - Don't forget the actual pod2pdf wrapper script which is also included in the distribution but not installed via make install.  Put it somewhere in your path.

For those of you who use TextMate, here's an awesome little AppleScript that you can put in your Finder window toolbar which will open the current folder in TextMate in directory browsing mode.  Save the source as a .scpt file and open it in ScriptEditor.  Save it as a run-only application and drag that app to your Finder toolbar.

I <heart> TextMate...  Can't.  Wait. For. TextMate. 2.0!  I can't imagine how it could get any better...