Sublime Text 2/3 for Django developer

Many developers know about this battle between emacs and vim. Well, not exactly between editors themselves, but rather between their fanboys. As for me, I started with gedit, default Gnome, therefore Ubuntu, text editor. After adding a couple of plugins, most importantly, dummy code completion it worked well for couple of months.

A bit later I decided gedit isn't cool enough :-) And made a switch to vim. Can't say this was love from first sight, but as longer I used it, more I liked it. I ended up being completely overtaken by command mode. I don't care if I need to type one more key to yield into system clipboard, I don't need it too often. But copying to internal registers, having them as many as I want, searching right under your pinky is awesome. I started using searching dozens of time more often, then I did in other editors and IDEs. Combining this with remembering of your positions (so you can jump to your previous cursor positions), changes, and thousands of other different things. You know, look at any vim cheat sheet, and you'll be scared and maybe interested :-)

Yes, I know, it takes time to learn it, even more time to get used to it, but when it is in your muscle memory it is extremely comfortable. But I still have different issues with it. I almost can't use Rope, code completion is almost as dumb as gedit's, and configuring it is cargo-cult for me :).

I tried emacs, but it uses many many more times control and alt keys. I don't really like this. Now let's move to the subject :-)

Text editor Sublime Text 2 is starting to gain more and more attention. It is multiplatform, quick, nicelooking editor with a couple of very interesting features.

One of the mostly used ST2 features is it's function for opening files from project. You can press Ctrl+P and start typing filepath and it will give a list of matching files. You have to create project first, to use this function. It works great and became very handy way to move between files. Other options is Ctrl+Shift+P - same kind of text input opens and you can start typing a command and it will filter it for you. For example you can type Rope and it will show you all the commands of rope on first place, and then other commands that have letters r,o,p,e in it. It is hard to explain, you should try it for yourself and you'll understand it quickly.

Opening file from project

Moving between methods is not harder - Ctrl+R and you see a list of methods in current file, can filter and quickly jump to their declaration.

Most surprising feature for me is vintage mode. It is a simulation of VIM's most commonly used commands, such as ghjk-navigation, commands for copying, deleting, pasting, inserting etc. But miracle didn't happen, it is quite restricted. Using motion commands isn't as consistent as in vim. ESC doesn't clears command, so if you typed d, you will delete something, no matter how many times you push ESC button. Vintage mode is made completely on keybindings, so maybe it is possible to fix some things, but I think emulate whole vim's behavior would be overkill.

Other great advantage of ST2 is it's configuration file. You can build your own from scratch, referring to default one, which is pretty well documented. Configuration file is json, so you don't have to learn another configuration language. My (tiny) configuration file is on github. 

I have installed couple of plugins for django development:

• Djaneiro is nice set of autocompletions, colorscheme for django. I printed their README to see all list of available substitutions, e.g. var becomes {{ }} in template, block becomes {% block %} {% endblock %}
• SublimeRope is an attempt to bring powerful library Rope into Sublime Text 2. Rope can do a lot of IDEish things with python code like extracting methods, searching for docstrings, going to definitions, renaming etc. At the moment it can do only renaming and moving to definitions but github repo is being updated time to time, so I hope we will see more features in future.
• SublimeLint  became a big discovery. I knew lint existed, but never actually used it. It can show you different warnings and errors like those big compilers have: variable declared but never used, unused imports, syntax errors and PEP8. This is not the best explanation what Lint is though :) It can make editor a bit slower, but you can turn off background linting and turn on when you need it again.

SublimeLint shows PEP8 warning

Autocompletions in ST2 is what I still don't understand. Quite often I can't predict what suggestions will it give, especially what it will autocomplete with Tab key.

Everybody is talking about minimap. I can't say anything about it. It is interesting way to find your place in file, no more, no less.

As a summary I think sublime can become my default editor. I use it for a week already, and though I miss some vim specific features, I like it very and very much. I think I'll try to do a reversed path. I want to try recreate all things i liked so much from ST2 in vim. Depending on results I'll choose one of them to use day-to-day.

Even if i will switch back to vim, Sublime Text 2 showed me some things in editor, that I liked and that can make my life easier and nicer. Users really don't know what they want, until they get it :)

Easy REST API with django-tastypie

One day at work I had to implement JSON response on simple GET request. I was just going to code another RESTish bicycle as my project manager told me to use django-tastypie. I'm sure he knows what he is talking about so I opened google to find what tastypie is.

When spec for my task was being written, author didn't think about what tool will be used for implementation. On the other side tastypie authors didn't know what people will do with their lib. So my task was to make this two worlds meet in one place. On github project page there's a simple example with very basic things showed. The real world is usually more complicated. I'll try to show you how I worked with tastypie.

Enhancing git commit message template

My faveourite DVCS git has a method to generate (or at least prepopulate) your commit message. I'm going to tell you how it works.

We're using a principle of feature branches at work. Every ticket, that is created on bugtracker receives it's own git branch. Sometimes you have to see all changes related to one ticket. But branches would be merged to master one day sooner or later so commits from different branches would be mixed. To solve this we have a convention, that every commit message has to start with 'ticket:###'.

Android App Inventor

I had an idea to develop for Android since bought this shiny, speedy, cooly Acer Liquid E. Anyone would like to! It's so smart, powerful and always stays with you literary everywhere! It is a great temptation not try to handle this power yourself.

I installed all requirements for development, but since then didn't have much urge to try do something with it because Android SDK would take time to get into. I am more focuse at Python and Django stuff at the moment. Meanwhile, I remember there's a thing called Android App Inventor - a tool for creating android apps visually, without actual coding. That's an easy way to try something on Android.

Simple automation of virtualenv creation

Working with python/django related things is a great fun if we're talking about actual development. But there's a couple of things around you have to keep in mind and manage manually. One of the most annoying thing you have to do is activating different virtual environments.

I have a few projects on my local machine, most of them have separate virtualenvs, so when you have to move from one project to another you have to deactivate one, activate other and only then start working. When I was starting developing I thought it's not a big deal - only two commands actually. But after a tens of switches you're starting to get angry. Solution for that was found on Max Klymyshyn blog. There's only one thing to mention - on Ubuntu I placed Max's code at $HOME/.bashrc, because Ubuntu doesn't respect .bash_profile.

But during last weekend I decided to try a couple of projects from github. And for everyone of them I had to create separate virtual environment (and as I'm so lazy I made it automatically started). While creating a new virtualenv, I thought that this whole procedure deserves a bit of automatization too. So I made a little bash script, that creates new clean virtual environment in a new directory. Here's a script:

#!/bin/bash
if [ $1 ]
then
     echo 'Making new dir' $1
    mkdir $1
    cd $1

    echo 'Creating new dev environment'
    virtualenv .env --no-site-packages
    echo VIRTUALENV_PATH=`pwd`/.env > .venv
else
    echo 'Parameter is required for dir name'
fi

It only checks that you've specified a name for a new directory, where virtualenv is going to be created. I put it to $HOME/bin/newenv file, and chmod +x newenv to make it runnable. So now every time I want to try something new from github I have to type only one command, that creates a great place for experiments, which virtualenv is activated right when I cd into this directory.

At last, I tweaked (in russian) my bash prompt. Now it shows if current dir is svn/hg/git repo, and if so, show the name of current branch and if it has not committed changes. It looks geeky as hell, but not so informative and usefull as I expected :) It slows down using of terminal (cause it runs all svn, hg and git twice after every command on terminal: first to get a branch name, and second - for status). And it takes a half of command line space. So, there's more cons then pros, but I'll see, maybe I'll get used to it so wouldn't be able to remove it.

Testing Google App Engine application

There was a time when I did no testing at all. (As The Kooks sing "You're so naive"). And Spycify was started and achieved it's first releases with about 0 tests. Those first versions were working, but had a whole bunch of annoying bugs. The only way I had is to do massive refactoring of whole app.

Previos versions were checked manually. I started a devserver, clicked through changed parts to see does it works. Sometimes this would not help and I had to upload app to production to test it there, manually, of course. Massive refactoring was a nice chance to start using automate testing. No more manual clicking and repeating myself.

Spycify them all!

Recently I've launched my first site, that was revealed to some friends whose critisism I'm not afraid of :). It is called Spycify, and was made just for fun using Python, Google App Engine and some outside APIs.

Actually I saw facedetection API on Programmable Web, and decided that I should do something with it. There was no doubt on selecting programming language. It is Python for sure. As a hosting/framework I've chosen Google App Engine. I see it as a free place for little experiments. I know my service wouldn't need any highscalability, performancability or other cool-abilities. This is just a good place to host a little project, fast to code, fast to deploy. I know that if I place my service on GAE it will be there forever some forseeable future, so I can come back to it, if I want to and show it. There's no need to think about hosting, domain name or something like this - it "just works".