I’ve been using the R language for some years now but didn’t have it installed on my current machine.

TextMate is a great editor to use as it has a custom bundle that gives you syntax highlighting and executes commands for you in the R console.

To install the R bundle:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
svn co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles/R.tmbundle/

Then in TextMate choose Bundles->Bundle Editor->Reload Bundles.

There is one tweak I make which is that I like to press ⌘ + RETURN to execute the current selection in the R console. So edit the bundle and find R.app in the commands and change the key. Also I like it to return back to text mate afterwards, so I add the following to the script:

-e ‘tell application “TextMate” to activate’ \

I also removed the line about setting the current dir. This was a little fiddly – I found that I had to make sure I selected the entire line and cut it then delete, making sure there are no end of line characters. So it looks like this:

# input is selection or document
rawText=”`cat`”
curDir=”
if [[ ${#TM_DIRECTORY} -gt 0 ]]; then
	curDir=”$TM_DIRECTORY”
fi
osascript -e ‘on run(theCode)’ \
		  -e ‘tell application “R” to activate’ \
		  -e ‘tell application “R” to cmd (item 1 of theCode)’ \
		  -e ‘tell application “TextMate” to activate’ \
		  -e ‘end run’ — “$rawText” “$curDir”

All good.

UPDATE: 07/02/2011 – R now comes with a 64bit version so if you are on a macbook you can replace “R” in the code above with “R64″

My first foray into customising emacs that didn’t involve copy and paste from something on the internet.

The problem with OS X and the uk keyboard is that the pound key actually has a £ on it. To get “#” you have to press alt+3

Of course, in emacs, the alt key is the meta key which is trapped by emacs. The simple function above inserted into your .emacs file should map the keys correctly.

Another option would be to re-map the apple key to be the meta key, perhaps another yak.

For copy and paste-ability:

;; Allow hash to be entered
(defun insert-pound ()
  “Inserts a pound into the buffer”
  (insert “#”))
(global-set-key (kbd “M-3″) ‘(lambda()(interactive)(insert-pound)))

I was recently installing a new machine and getting a strange feeling that something was awry with my IntelliJ fonts. They looked like they were not being anti-aliased, even though I had checked the correct option. Also I noticed that generally fonts were looking a bit ropey.

After some puzzling I discovered the dialog above. If you right click on the desktop then to properties->appearance->effects… you will see it and you need to make sure the font smoothing is checked.

Phew, now I have beautiful code again.

GET it from http://jruby.org/

There is a download page, download and exract the tar file somehwere.

I put it in /System/Library/Frameworks/JRuby.framework/jruby-1.5.1

I then created a symbolic link to jruby_current

ln -s jruby-1.5.1/ jruby_current

And then simply add it to my ~/.bash_profile

$vi ~/.bash_profile
export PATH=/System/Library/Frameworks/JRuby.framework/jruby_current/bin:$PATH
#Reload the profile…
$. ~/.bash_profile
#Try out jruby…
$jruby -v
jruby 1.5.1 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 249) (2010-06-06 f3a3480) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_17) [x86_64-java]

Now you can add the JRuby SDK to your Java Module in Intellij:

Now you can have ruby and Java in the same project. Awesome.

Today I spent a while puzzling over why my StringTemplates weren’t available on the classpath in Intellij.

I forgot that you have to specifically identify file types to copy into the classes folder, you do it in the project settings. Search for “resource” and look in the compiler settings.

I found that after an update, I was still seeing some entries lying around. Thanks to this issue on the intellij community forum I was able to simply remove the contents svn cache and it works.

~/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea90/vcsCache

Whilst playing around with some code analysis I thought it would be useful to be able to output a hyperlink back to a line of code in the IDE console. As it happens, you can “Trick” IntelliJ to do this with the following log statement:

    @Test
    public void canClickOnAFileInTheConsoleAndGoToTheLineOfCode() {
        log.info(String.format(“Check it at %s. (%s.java:%d)”,
            getClass().getName(), getClass().getSimpleName(), 15));
    }

The pattern it seems to match is something like at {classFullName}.{identifier}({classSimpleName}.java)

classFullName has to be a valid class name.
identifier is usually used for the method name, but it can be anything. The full stop is nescessary. So in the example above, I put a space in there and so it reads like a sentance.

Anyone know a another way to do this?

UPDATE:

Actually it seems that you can get something similar if you output a full path name, e.g.:

    File f = new File(“./src/test/resource/testfiles/level_01/level_01_01/file_01_01_A.txt”);
    log.info(f.getAbsolutePath() + “:” + 34);

This will create a link in the output window to the line of the file. Nice.

Mind mapping, invented by Tony Buzan is a way to get lots of ideas down and relate them together.

MindMeister is a great online Mind Mapping tool. It can be used for free but for $59 for a year you get things like offline access. It is completely written using html and javascript.

Map On!

REST Client plugin

It was also available from the plugins list in the settings.

Rest Client intellij plugin screenshot

On restart, IntelliJ just did not work, even After I removed the plugin (See this post for more plugin details)

Infact it seemed to hose my current project aswell – I had to remove intellij.app and replace it with the original download (Not forgetting of course to set the JVM version