Some quick keyboard commands I use often on the command line

• Repeat last command: !! and Meta(Alt)+. Not sure about the usefulness of this one, but might keep your fingers a little closer to the home row instead of the land of arrow keys.

• Begin and end: CTRL+a by itself moves your cursor to the beginning of the line. CTRL+e moves your cursor to the end of the line.

• Delete a line of text: Probably my most used keystroke: CTRL+a, CTRL+k = nuke the whole line of text. Don’t hit control twice, just hold it and hit “ak”. You can also do CTRL+u for the same effect, but I find myself using CTRL+ak more because of its home row goodness. The secret here is that CTRL+k deletes from the cursor positon to the end of the line. Well, if you are already at the beginning of the line then you’ve got the whole thing nuked.

• Undo: Whoops, you just nuked a line of text that you want back. Try CTRL+_ That’s an underscore, so you’ll need to press the shift key. Another way of writing it is CTRL+SHIFT+-.

All these commands work great in most Mac text input too (dagger-eyes at Adobe Air).

If you are running Snow Leopard and are trying to install SPSS 17, follow these instructions. I had to adjust a few steps personally, so YMMV. Specifically the instructions listed a path as /Library/System, and I’m pretty sure they meant /System/Library because the former wasn’t present on the system I was installing SPSS on.

http://plusrw.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/getting-spss-statistics-17-to-work-with-mac-os-x-snow-leopard/

If you are working with a file in vim that has unprintable characters in it (^@) to duplicate those for search and replace do CTRL+v CTRL+@ or whatever character it is.

In shorthand: ^v^@ is what you want.

Can’t ever remember how to do filters in haml, despite it being stupid easy:

Full doc here: http://haml-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.HAML_REFERENCE.html

Haml Filters

The colon character designates a filter. This allows you to pass an indented block of text as input to another filtering program and add the result to the output of Haml. The syntax is simply a colon followed by the name of the filter. For example,

%p
  :markdown
    Textile
    =======

    Hello, *World*

Current filter choices: plain, javascript, cdata, escaped, ruby, preserve, erb, sass, textile, maruku