Life has changed a little since the last report.
- A maxed out MacBook Air has replaced the Pro and I love it. The screen hinge is weak, the screen is reflective — those are annoying, yes. But overall, it weighs nothing, runs a VM effortlessly and I can work unplugged the whole day.
- sshfs and 10.8 are no longer friends. Sublime cannot reliably detect file changes anymore, so instead the guest OS now mounts a shared folder.
- Having to use
mercurial sucks and may deserve a separate post.
Over the past couple of years I have had the fortune to pick up some
great habits from great people. It is time to share an updated setup.
These are the things my work-life currently depends on.
Python
Life environment: OSX, iMac, MacBook Pro, and recently back to iPhone.
Dev environment: VirtualBox. I still like free, and VBox works
just fine.
Dev OS: Ubuntu Server. No more esoteric nonsense like Arch. The
skinnier Server Edition is preferred as I need very little graphics
capability from my Linux. Cannot stand Linux GUIs.
Now, how it all works together:
- Linux runs the code and manages packages. All the dev stuff stays
there. Linux runs in headless mode.
- OSX runs the editor (Sublime Text), terminal (iTerm), browsers,
etc. and keeps my senses happy with beautiful fonts.
sshfs: the sanest way I know to share files between host and
guest OSes. I keep a virtual directory mounted locally on OSX and
point the editor there.
X11: always ready when I do need to bring up a GUI tool over a
tunnel (I always ssh -X into my virtual machine), which are:
- git gui, gitk: if they are not part of your git-fu already, you
are missing out
- tig: very useful for a quick history browse
- IPython+Notebook: I often run my code as I'm testing it, and
IPython is the way to interact with the interpreter. As the
experiment grows or whenever working with data plots, firing up
Notebook is worth the hassle.
- nose+mock: I finally learned to stop worrying and love the tests.
Yes, tests are always worth having.
- Sublime Text: this probably deserves a separate post. In short,
breaking away from the IDE land has been a happy change.
- pianobar