helpful options for less
“less” the unix command, that is. The default behavior for less isn’t quite as good as it could be. I use a case insensitive search (actually ‘smartcase’) in vim, but less is case sensitive by default. You can pass -i on the command line or once less is started to get smartcase-like behavior in searches. Or you can put that in the $LESS variable in your .zshenv. My .zshenv has the following:
export LESS='-R -i --quit-if-one-screen'
Open Portable Atomics v1.0.0 released
We just released the first official release of the OpenPA project, v1.0.0. If you ever are thinking about writing inline assembly to perform atomic operations (compare-and-swap, fetch-and-increment, etc), then think about using OPA instead. It provides a consistent interface to primitive atomic operations via C functions and macros across multiple compilers and architectures. We have a solid range of platforms at this point, but we intend to add more in the future and we are always willing to accept contributions if you have a particular platform you would like to support.
You can download openpa-1.0.0 here if you are interested in playing around with it.
Leopard Terminal.app colors
Back in OS X 10.4 (Tiger) you used to be able to change text colors using a really unintuitive yet workable bit of UI. You would open a color dialog from any non-Terminal app, select the color you wanted, then drag that color to some existing bit of colored text that you wanted to be the new color in the future. I’m not a fan of this, but at least it’s one of these one-time things that you don’t do again until you get a new computer or have to reinstall the OS for some reason.
[...]Skim.app for large PDFs
If you have a Mac and you ever read large PDFs such as standards documents then you might think about checking out Skim.app. It lets you take notes, has sensible search highlighting, and has this crazy reading bar to help you keep your place when you are looking back and forth between the document and something else.
For some reason Preview.app always has flaky search for me. The cmd-G “repeat search” command only toggles between the first two or so results rather than all of them. Skim.app actually works like I expect and it highlights the results with easy to see red ovals and yellow highlights.
The pdfsync functionality seems like it would be cool but I haven’t gotten it to work correctly yet. It seems to give the wrong file and line numbers for a test PDF that I’ve been playing with. OTOH, I haven’t spent very much time getting it to work.