Hacking like a hacker on a Mac using iTerm2, tmux, emacs, irssi (and more).
Those are the softwares I use everyday to try to suck less during my hacking sessions. I found that staying inside a terminal and keeping both hand on the keyboard using my ten fingers increased my productivity.
iTerm2
You probably know or use iTerm, but did you know iTerm2 ? It’s an awesome terminal replacement for Terminal.app, and ships with pane splitting, themes, powerful keybinding, window hotkeying (goodbye Visor!) … A quick glance at its features should definitely convince you.
Emacs
Pretty easy to install using MacPorts or homebrew. Vim is good too. Using one or the other is mostly a matter of taste. By using the default keybindings, Vim users will find themselves hitting frequently the Esc key, whereas Emacs users have to befriend with Ctrl and Alt keys.
Emacs can be used either from inside the terminal or in GUI mode. We are talking about running Emacs inside iTerm2 here ! Run “emacs -nw” to shut down that GUI.
tmux
GNU screen on vitamins. Long story short, tmux is to screen what iTerm2 it to Terminal.app. More configurable, overall improvements … The folks at Hawkhost wrote a two-part tutorial on the why’s and the how’s of tmux.
irssi
IRC in your terminal iTerm2. More on this tutorial by Quadpoint.org.
Bonus
You can also use Solarized, a theme designed for terminal and GUI usage, declined for almost every existing editor/IDE and Oh my zsh, a community-driven framework to manage your zsh configuration.
Solarized
Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined set of hues based on fixed color wheel relationships. It has been tested extensively in real world use on color calibrated displays (as well as uncalibrated/intentionally miscalibrated displays) and in a variety of lighting conditions.
Download it for your favorite editor/IDE (vim, emacs, textmate) on the website of its creator, Ethan Schoonover
Oh my zsh
A community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 40+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, macports, etc), over 80 terminal themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.
Fork it from Robby Russel’s github repository. Steve Losh details his configuration and Intridea has a pretty good explanation of the setup and some tips for a homebrewed configuration.
