Programming Environment

There was a bit of downtime at work while we waited for QA to verify our release. I took the oppurtunity to get my workstation running lean and mean.

First thing was to find a good font. I’m pretty sick of Monaco. After looking at basically all of the available free programming fonts, I went with Deja Vu. It’s just like the BitStream Vera, but with more international characters. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the one true font.

The second thing to get was TmCodeBrowser, for browsing code in TextMate. TextMate’s built-in parser is a little weak. I’m sure there is a good reason why it doesn’t recognize a function declaration that’s been split up over multiple lines, but it’s a little surprising from a program that is insistent on the use of regular expressions.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

—Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs

I also grabbed Menu Meters, mostly as a way of checking if I had unknowingly written an infinite loop or memory leak.

Finally, I tweaked colormake to not highlight anything except errors and warnings and installed that too.