Update: I'm now using Ack in Project, which is even better!

Textmate is a nice editor, but it's "Find in Project" (⇧⌘F) function is annoying slow in large projects.

So, I'm happy to have found an alternative: GrepInProject++, which leverages the raw power of find(1) and grep(1) for super fast searching. The original GrepInProject was created by Henrik Nyh; Robert Thurnher added a better UI and some other features.

Enjoy it thusly:

• Download and unpack GrepInProject.zip
• Install the UI support files as follows:

$ sudo mv GrepInProjectSearch.nib /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/nibs/

• Open GrepInProject.tmCommand with Textmate

By default the "Grep in Project" command is bound to ⇧⌘F, replacing the built-in "Find in Project" command.

Note: my version is ever-so-slightly different to Robert's; I changed the find to use name rather than path matching (saving a few precious milliseconds), and removed a redundant "recursive" option from the grep.

I recently bought a Mac Mini to serve various purposes about the house - not least of which, as a remote backup server for my MacBook Pro.

At which point I spent several evenings wrestling with Time Machine, with limited success. I moved my existing (500G, external) drive to the Mac Mini, shared it, and nominated it as my backup volume. But:

• Time Machine wouldn't recognise the existing backups on that drive, and insisted on starting again from scratch (because it creates sparsebundle disk images for remote backup clients, but not for the local system). Annoying.
• The initial backup took forever, because TM backs up everything not specifically excluded. (Granted, I'm backing up over a 801.11g wireless network).
• Incremental backups kicked in every hour, and even when I hadn't been altering files, seemed to take an excessive amount of time to complete, ie. around 15 minutes. Much of this time was spent "preparing", and affected the performance of both my laptop, and the network. I don't need or want hourly backup, but TM provides no way to set a less demanding schedule.
• Several times things got borked when I interrupted a backup midway, and I had to reboot, remount or otherwise intervene to get things working again.

Eventually, I gave up, and went looking for alternatives. After flirting with rdiff-backup and rsnapshot, I eventually did a little research and rolled my own rsync backup script:

#! /bin/sh

set -e 

snapshot_host=theLoungeRoomMac.local
snapshot_dir=/Volumes/WD_500/Snapshots/woollyams
snapshot_user=root
ssh_user=$snapshot_user@$snapshot_host

ping -o $snapshot_host > /dev/null || {
  echo "WARNING: can't see $snapshot_host -- skipping backup"
  exit 1
}

ssh $ssh_user "test -d $snapshot_dir" || {
  echo "ERROR: can't see $ssh_user:$snapshot_dir" >&2
  exit 2
}
  
snapshot_id=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`

/usr/bin/rsync --archive --verbose \
  --delete --delete-excluded \
  --numeric-ids --extended-attributes \
  --one-file-system \
  --partial \
  --link-dest ../current/ \
  --relative \
  --max-size=50M \
  --exclude ".git" \
  --exclude ".svn" \
  /private/etc /Users/mdub \
  $ssh_user:$snapshot_dir/in-progress/

ssh $ssh_user "cd $snapshot_dir; rm -fr $snapshot_id; mv in-progress $snapshot_id; rm -f current; ln -s $snapshot_id $snapshot_dir/current"

Advantages over Time Machine are:

• I can run this as often or as infrequently as I like.
• I'm currently running it out of /etc/daily.local, which is run by periodic, which is run by launchd.
• It doesn't get in my way by running while I'm actively using my machine.
• I can use the full power of rsync filter rules to exclude uninteresting files (e.g. "--exclude .git --exclude .svn").
• I can even filter by file size ("--max-size=50M") to skip things like big downloads and VMware images, without having to explicitly nominate them.
• It takes less than 3 minutes to perform an incremental backup (providing I haven't changed too much).
• I can safely interrupt the backup process, or pull the plug, or whatever, and it's robust enough to carry on where it left off next time.
• I can keep as many time-stamped snapshots as I wish.
• It's relatively efficient space-wise, due to the use of hard-links to share unchanged files between snapshots (not as efficient as Time Machine, though, which hard-links entire directories).
• Each snapshot is a simple, easy-to-browse, easy-to-search directory, containing plain old files and directories. It gives me comfort that I wouldn't need a spiffy GUI to locate a file I was looking to restore.

Git is the hype. I'm just starting to use it for a couple of projects, both directly, and as a local facade to Subversion.

Here are some suggestions on using git under Mac OS X.

Installation

Installation using MacPorts is pretty painless. Ensure you choose the "svn" variant if you want Git/Subversion integration.

sudo port install git +svn +doc

Another option is the native installer, available at http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/

Textmate

If you use Textmate, the Git Textmate bundle is rather nice.

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
git clone git://gitorious.org/git-tmbundle/mainline.git Git.tmbundle

Remember to set the TM_GIT variable (to "/opt/local/bin/git" or "/usr/local/bin/git", as the case may be), otherwise stuff won't work.

Shell completion

For command-line (bash) users, there's TAB-completion available, which is pretty handy. I'm using it directly from my local clone of the git source tree, like this:

# in .bashrc ...

git_completion_script=$HOME/OpenSource/kernel.org/git/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash
if test -f $git_completion_script; then
  source $git_completion_script
fi

GitNub for history browsing

GitNub is a sweet little UI for browsing history of git commits.

Using Git

So far, I haven't talked at all about how you actually USE the thing, and don't intend to, since there are already so many great resources out there on the subject. Some I've found useful are:

• A tutorial introduction to git
• Git for SVN users
• Git cheat-sheets from Zack Rusin and Err the blog
• Andy Delcambre's Git SVN Workflow

In my new job, a Mac is the preferred tool of the trade. So now I'm learning to use a nice shiny MacBook Pro, and after years developing on Windoze, it's a very pleasant experience. Here are some of the things that are making my life just that little bit more delightful:

• It's Unix. On Windoze, Cygwin helped a little, but this is soooo much better.
• Launchbar - an application launcher and more. I bought this almost immediately after getting my Mac, based on some random recommendation somewhere, and haven't regretted it - I probably use it once every 5 minutes, on average. I've subsequently tried Quicksilver, but it didn't feel immediately "right" in the same way Launchbar does.
• Textmate - "the missing editor". I've been a dedicated Emacs user for about 20 years now, but had to give Textmate a try, given all the hype. It's noice! Many of the features I know and love from Emacs are there (albeit bound to different cryptic key-combinations), and the UI is clean and Mac-savvy.
• 1Password - a password manager. I got this handy little utility as part of a bundle from macheist.com. It stores all your passwords in a (secure) keychain, indexed by website, making it really easy to log back in next time you visit. Best of all, it integrates with most browsers, meaning you only need to store passwords once. It can store multiple sets of login details per site, too, which is very useful when testing web-apps.
• Safari is a nice little web browser, and once you turn on the debug menu, it's even better. Normally, I'd reach for Firebug for this sort of functionality, but the built-in Safari equivalent is almost as good.