ZenLinux Blog

Last night’s NHRuby.org meeting went very well, despite sub-optimal brightness from my LCD projector. You can view a meeting summary on our wiki.

When I first watched the PeepCode RJS screencast, I noticed that TextMate (an OS X programmer’s editor) has a really nifty file open dialog. It opens a pop-up window where you can simply start typing the name of a file in your project and you will be presented with a drop-down list of files that match. As you type more, the list narrows down, or you can select one of the filenames to open with your arrow keys.

I immediately started drooling over this and figured there had to be a way to do this in jedit, my preferred editor. The OpenIt plugin is the one you want to enable for this. As with everything in jedit, you can configure this plugin to your heart’s content, telling it to compile its list of available filenames from the current Project, or every file under a certain directory tree. You can also tell it to ignore certain filename patterns when it generates the list. I have OpenIt bound to the Ctrl-Alt-o keyboard shortcut.

Oh, and if you’re not using jedit with Java 1.6, I’d strongly recommend trying it out. There is a significant performance boost, and the font antialiasing is improved. There are a few guides and debian packages floating around for Java 1.6 that you can find for Ubuntu on the Ubuntu Forums.

Are you an Ubuntu Linux-using internet junkie looking for a productivity boost? This blog post on running a local DNS cache with dnsmasq is trivially easy to follow and it really makes a difference. Spend three minutes setting it up and enjoy a noticeable speed boost when accessing your daily internet destinations.