Improving development environment on MacOS Snow Leopard

Spent weekend improving terminal, bash and vim configs and learning some new tricks.

vim config

I was using astrail's dotvim solution. It worked good, but braids are terrible. So I was playing with git submodules to see if they can do better. They can not, but during investigation I've spotted vundle.

It was good surprise to see that astrails switched to vundles. Now, dotvim project is much better. Clone it. Edit vundels.vim to get plugins you need from github, vim-scripts or any other git repo. Run make install. In five you'll get everything installed.

shell

I don't use apple's bash, but one from gentoo prefix, but it was configured in terminal app to start after open. It works for primary user, but sudo su - still was colorless, without bash completion.

To change shell in MacOS you have to use chsh command and also full path to the shell script must be /etc/shells.

bash history

I'm used to one liners up to 500 characters long :). Always have 5-15 shell sessions running for months. My goal was to make history longer, shared acros sessions and less bloated with often commands.

Found helpful discussion on StackOverflow, but decided to stick to variant when history file is updated after every command, but session's is not refreshed from the file:

    export HISTSIZE=10000
    export HISTFILESIZE=10000
    export HISTCONTROL="ignorespace:erasedups"
    export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; $PROMPT_COMMAND"
    export HISTIGNORE="cd *:ls *:mplayer *"

I'm going to use history -r when I need some random command.

Colors in Terminal.app

While playing with vim config I've noticed that solarized theme doesn't look like on public screenshots. Terminal app on Snow Leopard supports only 8 colors. 256 colors only supported on Lion. I've switched to iTerm2 application and set TERM to xterm-256color.

Beside colors it has full screen mode and other nice features I'm going to use.