How to actually work

Don’t tell anyone (particularly not your clients and especially not my clients) but making websites is really very easy. Don't make it harder by deliberately hindering yourself. You should always try to travel the shortest distance between “amends needs done” and “amend is done”. Again, I hear a “Pah!” in the distance, “Well, that’s obvious.”, but is it? Are you sure you’re ‘Being all you can be’?

The shortest distance

Okay, picture the scene: you've run out of socks. You need to put on a load of washing. The washing is in a pile in the corner of the room. You hunch over, pick up all the socks, pants, t-shirts and walk, waddle and totter to the washing machine. As you walk, you drop a sock and bend down to pick it up, dropping another. You recover that one and another falls. Eventually, you make it to the washing machine after a few minutes, put everything in, throw in some powder and set it going. As you head back to your bedroom, you spot three more socks that you missed. Darn.

Okay, picture the scene: you've run out of socks. You need to put on a load of washing. Fortunately, every time you took your socks off, you put them straight in the washing machine. You wander to the kitchen, put in the powder and switch it on. Done.

Any time you try to do anything, the more steps involved between intention and completion, the more likely it is to go wrong. Whether the intention is 'wear clean socks' or 'update this website', if you can do it in a handful of steps, you'll make fewer mistakes than if you have to do it in a hunched-over armful.

Workflow. The flow. Of Work.

The next time you're making an amend somewhere, watch yourself. Watch which applications you jump between. Don't just make your changes, pay attention to how you do them. Are you jumping between text editor and FTP client? Text editor and web browser? FTP and Subversion? Just take a few minutes to think about which steps you might be able to miss out. For instance, if you use Textmate and Transmit, you can set up DockSend so that pressing ctrl-shift-f then 2 will upload the file you currently have open to the same place on the server. You can now change the editor↔FTP↔browser cycle to editor↔browser.

However...

Seamless does not imply flawless. Don't be tempted to simplify to the stage where you don't need any interaction between making a change and the change being live. If you rely on the fact that your changes 'just happen', you might be tempted not to check. That's the point at which they don't 'just happen'.

Another game concept prototype – Sine

Honestly, I have no idea what I was going for with this one. It started off last weekend with a vague idea about matching patterns of numbers and old-school graphics and I don't know what and ended up with this.

The idea is to make the bottom row match the top row, basically. There are several front-ends to this game so you can choose the style of play you prefer - numbers and letters, waves, colours or a generated sound wave (if you have a shiny new-fangled browser). It uses the nifty little Riffwave library to generate PCM data and push it into an audio element.

Further development

If I were to develop this further, I'd try and build it in a modular fashion so that front-ends could be generated really easily and open it to other people to see how many different ways this game could be played. It'd be an interesting social experiment to be able to play what is fundamentally the same game in a dozen different ways. You could find out if visual thinkers processed the information faster than numerical or audio-focused people. Leaderboards could allow different styles of player to compete on the same playing field but with a different ball (hmm, weak sports analogy). The rhythms of the game lend themselves well to generated drum tracks so there's probably something in that area for exploring as well.

At the moment, the code is written as the programming equivalent of stream-of-consciousness – global variables everywhere, some camel-case, some underscored, vague comments sprinkled around. There's some commented-out code for the wave mode that moves the waves closer together so that there's a time-limit set but I felt it didn't suit the game.

Okay, this'll be my last vim post for a while. I just couldn't leave it alone, though.

My Cobalt theme was good but it wasn't quite enough. You'll see from the screenshots that the entire HTML page had the same background colour in Vim while the TextMate version changed the background colour inside <style> and <script> blocks. I was surprised how much that bugged me so I figured there must be a way to highlight an entire line. It turns out this isn't a trivial thing to do. Syntax matches will only match to the final character in the line ($), not the width of the screen. No amount of tweaking a colorscheme would allow highlighting all the way across.

After a lot of digging around, I found out about signs. This is a built-in feature which allows you to add a marker to a line for whatever purpose you want. It can point out debugging information or provide visual checkpoints to mark out things in your document. It's probably very handy but as I've only just started using vim, I don't really know what it's best for. However, as a side-effect, it can also apply a style to the entire screen-width of a line.

Some googling, hacking and probable violation of Vim plugin best-practice, I knocked together this plugin:

HighlightBlocks.vim

When this is installed, it will highlight any embedded CSS or JS blocks in a HTML, PHP, Velocity templates or Ruby files. Well, it will apply the syntax class 'HighlightedBlock' to the line. If your theme has a style for that, it will highlight it. Incidentally, I updated the Cobalt port to include that style.

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It runs on initial load then refreshes every time you exit insert mode.

I might update it later to highlight PHP blocks in HTML or some other things like that but for my current purposes, it's finished.

Warning

• It pays no attention to existing signs. If you use them, you probably shouldn't use this. If you know of a simple way to group signs together to stop me messing with them, let me know.
• When signs are added to a file, an extra two-character column appears to the left of the line numbers. This plugin shrinks the line-numbers column by two characters if signs exist and increases it again when they are removed. This stops everything from jumping around but if you're working on a 10,000 line file, you might see some confusion down the bottom.

Installation

As with the Cobalt theme, if you're using Janus, add this to ~/.janus.rake, I still have no idea if this works. It might. :

vim_plugin_task "HighlightBlock.vim", "git://github.com/thingsinjars/HighlightBlock.vim.git"

What?!

Another port of the TextMate theme 'Cobalt' to Vim?

But there are already so many!

Yes. Yes there are. However, the other ones I found were all missing something. Some had the right colours but in the wrong places, some had most of the right things highlighted but in slightly wrong colours. None of them had coloured the line-numbers. I think this is the most complete port. The initial work was done automatically using Coloration and then manually tweaked and added to. I know I should probably have just picked one of the existing GitHub projects, cloned it and pushed to it but I feel it would be a tad presumptuous of me to just turn up in someone's repository one day saying "yeah, you did alright but mine's better". Besides, I've never tried making a theme for Vim before. I've probably done something wrong (see below). If it continues to work for a while without causing any major issues, I might look at pushing it to another repo.

This was done on top of a vanilla install of the excellent Janus configuration of MacVim so whatever plugins are installed by default may have an affect on this.

There are a few limitations in the syntax files enabled by default so this includes a couple of matches, regions and things that really shouldn't be in a colorscheme file but I've included them because I felt like it and it was the only way to really match some of the highlighting TextMate allows (this is the thing I was referring to above).

I haven't really touched the NerdTree colouring much as it's probably impossible to have different background colours in different panes. Can't guarantee that, though.

Installation

There are probably some conventions to do with how to organise a GitHub project so that it can be automatically installed but I've just gone with sticking it in a directory called 'colors' so it can be pulled in from the root of your ~/.vim directory.

If you're using Janus, add this to ~/.janus.rake, I think it'll work:

vim_plugin_task "Cobalt.vim", "git://github.com/thingsinjars/Cobalt.vim.git"

If you're not using Janus, you probably know what you're doing anyway.

The GitHub project is here:

• github.com/thingsinjars/Cobalt.vim

Screenshots

The first of each pair is Vim, the second is the TextMate original.

Editing CSS

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Editing HTML

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