Ruby on Rails Planet

Termistat : a status bar for your terminal »

Created at: 26.08.2011 20:03, source: OnRails.org, tagged: ruby terminal status bar

When running background processes that produce detail logging, it’s often difficult to strike the right balance between providing overall status information and details about the current step in the process. It’s helpful to be able to see “tail-like” information at the detail level to monitor and debug your processes; however, it’s also helpful to be able to know summary information, such as the overall progress through the entire task. You can intersperse “record 1 of n” lines in your output, but they are easy to miss in all the noise.

In order to be able to display both types of information concurrently, I built a simple gem called termistat, which allows you to display a status bar for summary information at the top of your terminal in addition to the original detailed output. It was meant to be a whyday contribution, but I didn’t quite finish it in time to be released on whyday…oh well.

Here’s a screenshot of termistat in action:
termistat screenshot

Termistat requires the ffi-ncurses gem (which requires the ncurses library to be on your system), and has a configuration DSL to customize the appearance somewhat. Check it out and let me know if you have any ideas for improvement!

Join the zsh revolution »

Created at: 27.05.2010 20:17, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: zsh ohmyzsh console terminal bash

I love the OhMyZsh community. Let’s grow it a little more this next Tuesday.

Join the Zsh revolution here…

(oh my) Zsh themes Gone Wild! 18+ »

Created at: 28.12.2009 08:25, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: programming zsh ohmyzsh github terminal

Earlier this evening, I accepted a pull-request for theme number 18, which is now included in Oh My Zsh. To celebrate, I’ve updated the themes wiki page with fresh screenshots.

Here is a sampling of some of the themes that you can use out of the box with Oh My Zsh.

Oh My Zsh is much more than a collection of themes for your zsh config. It’s a way of life¹.

Also, be sure to follow ohmyzsh on twitter now!

¹ well.. at least while you’re in the terminal. ;-)

Oh My Zsh gets an auto-updater »

Created at: 01.10.2009 05:21, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: programming zsh bash terminal project

I wanted to publically thank everyone for helping me get Oh My Zsh out there and continue to improve it. Many of us spend a lot of time in our terminals throughout the day and I firmly believe that having a well-working shell is nearly as important as having a well-working texteditor.

While Oh My Zsh isn’t a large project, it is my attempt to share what I’ve learned about using zsh with others… but honestly, my goal is to learn from you. I don’t have a lot of time to really dive into the deepend of the zsh-pool so am relying on others to share their tricks, hacks, functions, themes, etc. So, I thought that if I created a basic framework with outlined some conventions so that others could contribute, that perhaps I’d end up with a kickass shell.

So far… Oh My Zsh has been forked on github 25 times and is being watched by over 100 people.

Last week, I pushed out an update that introduces an auto-update feature. I’m quite keen of desktop applications that can auto-update themselves, so our initial version of this feature will ask you no more than once a week if you want to check for updates. This means that as we continue to extend and improve Oh My Zsh, you can keep up-to-date.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

It’s the beginning of a new month… are you still using Bash? Perhaps you’re using your own zsh configuration but want to see what else zsh can offer you? I invite you to install Oh My Zsh today. :-)

Just run this in your terminal and you’ll get setup. Don’t worry… you won’t lose your existing configuration. :-)

wget http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O - | sh

For more infromation, visit http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/

Oh My Zsh gets theme support »

Created at: 31.08.2009 18:00, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: programming shell zsh terminal prompt git console themes

I just pushed a small change to Oh My Zsh, which gives it rudimentary support for themes. What I’m hoping to do is collect prompts from tons of people and make it simple for others to find a PROMPT that works well for them.

robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh at 2c9f74b5c3f6910e7c66601008e9ddd0444b70c7 - GitHub

As of right now, there are only three for you to choose from. So, please head over to github, fork Oh My Zsh, add your theme, and send a pull request. :-)