Huh?

In recent weeks, I’ve stumbled over so many Tools for managing code snippets, it’s not funny any more. Viusual Studio plugins, TextMate plugins, apps for Windows, apps for OSX, apps for the web… what’s the matter? Why is everybody suddenly horny for little snippets of code?

I’ve thought about trying out a code snippet application, but… I wouldn’t really know what to do with one. I have no fucking clue, really! Yes, of course, you’re supposed to enter little snippets of code that you think could be useful in the future, but I somehow have never come accross these.

I don’t really need snippets, do I?

Of course, I have code on my hard drive that I will definitely reuse. For example, I have a folder called CSS with CSS files to reset font and spacing settings and set grid systems. I also have a folder with an almost-finished CMS that will most certainly be included in more than one web-app of mine.

But that doesn’t really merit a whole App. So I don’t use one. And this is okay by me, or at least I think so.

But what if I’m missing out on something really cool?

What if there are indeed cool things to be said about Schnippets, and I just haven’t realized them? That would suck. Are you using a code snippet app? If so, what for? I’m looking forward to your ideas.

-DNDEBUG -g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -DWITH_APPINIT=1 -I/opt/local/include -I/opt/local/include/python2.5 -c _tkinter.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5/_tkinter.o
unable to execute -DNDEBUG: No such file or directory
error: command '-DNDEBUG' failed with exit status 1

Seems like the port doesn’t call gcc [args] to compile the binary, but only the [args], which often start with -DNDEBUG. (which, incidentally, is hard to google for, because of the minus sign.)

afb@macports.org has the reason for this:

It seems that those python ports are expecting $CC to be set in build as well as in configure, and fall back to random values such as “” or “cc” or “/usr/bin/gcc-4.0″ when it isn’t. This probably also explains why rerunning the build sometimes succeeds, if something else was adding a $CC to the environment that can be picked up as a lucky guess second time.

A workaround is setting the build.enc environment variable like so:

sudo su
password:
set build.env="CC=gcc"

and then run port. Here’s the ticket for more info.

With Windows Vista, Ubuntu 7.10 and Mac OS Leopard we’re experiencing the newest generation of operating systems. All three are (to a point) better than their predecessors and acquired tons of new features, both big and small.

There is a feature though, that I sorely miss in all the OSes as of today.

Sometimes when a friend visits me, I want to copy some files from ~/Music/PublicDomain and some from ~/Music/CreativeCommons and some from ~/Movies/OnlyLegalVideosHere over to their USB drive.

Or sometimes I want to get 13 different Linux ISOs from my file server.

I usually end up having 10 or more copy-jobs open at once, regardless of whether I use Linux, Windows or OS X, which vastly decreases my overall performance: My computer gets slower and the files take longer to copy. And my screen gets all cluttered up.

So I’d like to suggest an advanced form of the copy dialogue: Add a copy queue. What I want is something like this:

I copy a file somewhere, and while I see the little progress bar window, I can simply drag another file or folder onto the bar, adding it to its queue. The files will then be copied one after the other.

The above mock-up shows how this could look like. When a whole folder is dropped into the window, its files will be added to the queue individually.

This has a lot of advantages over the many-windows method.

• It uses your available bandwidth more effectively.
  A drive usually will be faster when it doesn’t have to fetch files from different blocks at once. So you have less search time and your file will complete more quickly. Over the network, you should also have less overhead copying just one file at a time.
• Your desktop won’t get cluttered.
  This is obvious. Instead of many small copy windows, you’ll have one big window you can handle or hide more easily.
• You can sort your files by importance.
  Just drag the most important file to the top of the list. Once it has finished copying, you can start working on it right away, while the rest of the files is still being copied.
• Time estimates get more accurate.
  When you have 10 files being copied at once, the time estimates in the different windows will usually be far off. Compare that to copying a folder at once, where the estimate is usually quite good. With all files to copy in one queue, the OS should be able to calculate the remaining time quite accurately.

So that’s my idea. As far as I know, this is not possible in today’s operating systems, but I could be wrong.

The only way to get that functionality I know of is to stack cp instructions in the console with &&, but that’s not very user-friendly.

Alright, dear OS writers, get going! I’d be delighted to see this in a file manager somewhere. What about you?