Terminal Productivity Tip: Auto-Complete

One really handy trick I actually wasn't aware of for a long time is that most terminal systems feature an auto-complete. Simply press Tab when typing a word to complete the word, press Tab twice to display a list of all the possibilities. Be aware, many terminal systems (such as Bash) are Case Sensitive when you are using autocomplete, which can be confusing when commands such as cd are not.

If you have any great tips, be sure and comment them, or send them to @multithreadblog.

Web 2.0 Site of The Day: Evernote

One of the most useful apps I've encountered in the last few years is Evernote. It has a bunch of handy features, but essentially it's a internet accesible, synced, notebook system for your computer, mobile and web. There are native clients for Blackberry, iphone, Palm Pre, Mac, and PC, but the app's core function is available for any single application that is internet or email capable. The website itself allows you to view and edit all your notes, full functionality, and you can set up an email address to email notes too.

I currently have an android phone, so to take notes I use the email address post method. One really awesome feature that evernote possesses is that it can search the text inside of images. So you can scribble down some notes on a knapkin, take a cellphone pic, and email it to your evernote account. Although it won't convert the whole image to text, you can easily find the note you wrote about "buy a new camera" by searching for "camera."

I use the app as a universal capture for things I need to remember no matter where I am. Whether I'm on my computer, walking on the street, on somebody else's desktop I can access my notes and keep track of numbers or ideas. Whiteboards, napkin breakthroughs, notes from borrowed paper, posters for design inspiration, jotted down Wifi codes... it's all available and easy to access from everywhere.

Evernote is free with ads on the clients and site, and up to 40MB per month upload from your various clients, which I have found to be sufficient so far. I highly recommend using it, it's replaced and consolidated the way I remember small items and ideas throughout my life.

Terminal Productivity Tip: ^^ notation

It turns out that most of us computer users have to use the glorious old terminal every once in a while, whether it's finding out our IP, finding out whether your internet is down by pinging google, or installing updates on our server over SSH. Today's tip will help you out when you have multiple tasks to do with similar syntax, or when you misspell a command.

The notation for this command is "^foo^bar" where "foo" is a snippet in the last executed command that you want to find and replace and "bar" is what you want there instead. It automatically executes the command as well. So next time you accidentally type "pnig www.google.com", instead of having to type the command all over again, just type "^pni^pin", and it'll execute "ping www.google.com." This is also useful if you are installing apps using "apt-get" in debian based linux, like Ubuntu. Sometimes I can't quite remember the name of the package, so I can easily try a few combinations without having to retype the whole "sudo apt-get install [package-name]" over and over.

If you liked today's hint, be sure to subscribe. Any questions or suggestions can be directed to evan [a] multithreadedmind.com, or to @multithreadblog on twitter.

Google Productivity Tip: Google Reader Subscription Folders

I digest around two-hundred feed items per morning... and a recent discovery allows me to get through my feeds even faster.

I've grouped my feeds by normal topic, such as Tech, Business, World News, Design, Photography, Programming. When I view by folder, it allows me to see easily the duplicate topics. So when a new iphone comes out, rather than have the same details scattered throughout my feeds I can deal with all of them at once, and set the rest as read.

Of course, a computer organization scheme wouldn't be complete without a couple keyboard shortcuts... In order to move between folders press Shift + J/K, just like moving throughout the feed items. To open the folder, press Shift + O. And of course, to return to your main window, press G + A to "Go to All Items."

If you have any other suggestions or ideas, please comment me or reply me at @multithreadblog.

Google Productivity Tip: Shortcuts

One of the beauties of google's system is that they try their best to keep keyboard shortcuts consistent across their products. (There's even a lab version of the search that enables keyboard shortcuts!) But if you forget, there is only one shortcut you have to remember. Pressing the "?" key on any google app brings up the shortcut list in a nice, easy to read popup. So remember this, especially on google reader and calendar, where you tend forget the shortcuts you don't use often.

Firefox Productivity Tip: Ubiquity

Web 2.0 Site Alert: Mozilla Bespin

Keep an eye on this one. It's growing fast, and becoming more and more powerful. Mozilla Bespin is a project to create a full, textmate style text editor inside your web browser. Recent additions to the code include multiuser editing/collaboration, and more importantly, subversion/git controls. It includes preview/run functions for HTML/javascript, and is quite stable now.

One interesting feature is they plan to integrate it with sites like sourceforge.net and github, thereby making the process of checking out and making changes happen completely in the browser. Couple this power with a tablet like the promised Apple wonder or the Crunchpad, and you've got a winning combination for coding on the go.

In the past, when I've had to work on sites on the go, I've often ftp'd in through someone else's computer terminal app, ssh'd to my server and edited the files on emacs or vi. Maybe now I'll just boot up a browser.