I love the terminal. Besides the fact it makes you look awesome while using it, it can also do about a gazillion different things. Most of them useful.

One thing is for sure, while developing webapps I have it running all the time and spend a lot of time running commands and monitoring output. So why not make it look as pretty as it is awesome? In this short walkthrough I’ll explain how to customize the terminal to make it look like mine, but make sure you fiddle with the settings so it works best for you.

So there we go. Writing this post in vim. Macvim to be exact. Trying not to touch the arrow keys, not use the h-j-k-l too extensively either, work with A and I a lot, and generally trying not to cock things up too much by hitting the wrong commands.

Just a quick note, the CakePHP PHPUnit installer has been updated to use version 3.7.8. Go grab it here if you are no fan of PEAR and want a self contained PHPUnit testing system.

Works on Mac OSX, Linux and Windows.

As some of you may know, even though I don’t blog all that often, I do mess about with it a lot. Mostly on what makes it run. Switching between Croogo, a custom built CakePHP site, Wordpress .. and back again.

A while ago we were proud to be releasing 2 of the very first Spotify Apps in the Netherlands at NoProtocol. For a long time since I’ve been planning on creating a Boilerplate in which we could put all the best practices and redo some stuff in hindsight.

And finally, it’s here! You can grab it at https://github.com/Hyra/Spotify-Boilerplate

For a bit more in-depth information, read on ..

I have been working on a pure HTML front-end for one of the pet projects I’m doing. A lot of fun, but while developing, running the terminal commands to compile both the .less and .coffee files gets a tad tedious. “Watchr” to the rescue! With this little gem you can watch specific folders or file extensions and run commands based on the files you watch.

Here is how I got it set up now ..

I recently started creating a RESTful API in CakePHP to work with a Knockout.js frontend.

While Knockout.js is a lot of fun, it does expect your JSON to be in a certain format.

I was breaking my head over failing unit tests when trying to test a simple Controller that was saving a new record.

Turned out it was failing only on the command line, while the webversion was passing all the tests.

Luckily, the solution was simple ..

Today I decided to tinker some more on our Spotify App, only to find that the Preview Build had expired, and was not gonna launch. Period. Great, so now what?

I decided to have a look at Twitter Bootstrap 2, and had it run through my LESS Component. I then realized the component didn’t support subfolders!