What Is Your Workstation Tag?

At Pivotal, we love our large, shared workspace and homogeneous workstations. As we move from project to project, our workstations are pretty much the same: iMacs with TextMate, RubyMine, Quicksilver (bound to ⌘+space, of course!) a full Ruby/Rails stack, and a few other applications. Given this minimal setup, I can figure out which developers have used a particular workstation given the extra applications installed upon it. I’ve come to see certain applications as a developer’s “tag,” like a graffiti signature.

Silverflow for Quicksilver: Pivot David G. was here!
iStat menues: David S. been here!
Microsoft IntelliType for Mac: Jonathan B. tagged this machine.

As for me, if you see and , then I’ve tagged your machine.

What are your tags?

8 Comments

Josh Susser says:

I tweak the terminal colors and shell prompt. Didn’t you notice that when we were pairing today?

I like the cyan prompt on a dark olive bg:
`export PS1=”[33[36m]h:W>[33[0m] “`

I also activate the Keychain padlock utility menu so I can lock the screen to keep the cleaners from typing random crap when they wipe down the keyboard. You can activate the menubar icon in Keychain Access preferences – Show Status in Menu Bar.

And of course I always create a Fluid.app for Pivotal Tracker!

March 19, 2009 at 2:37 am

Harry Vangberg says:

On a fresh install one of the first things I do is to install [PCKeyboardHack](http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/macosx/keyremap4macbook/) and remap the tab-key to act as ESC. (And that makes my second software tag pretty easy to guess, doesn’t it?)

March 19, 2009 at 8:04 am

Ned Baldessin says:

When I’m doing frontend work, I’ll need DefaultFolderX.

More generally, these days, I’m leaving a trail of Spotify clients on all the computers I use :)

March 19, 2009 at 1:04 pm

Corey Innis says:

I’m definitely a fan of iStat menus… much more attractive and Mac-like than MenuMeters, in my opinion.

For QuickSilver, I quickly switch to these:

* “Start at login”
* “Show icon in menu bar” (and not in the dock)
* “Bezel” for the Command Interface
* Uncheck “Reset search after” (I’m a slow typist)

On my personal computer, I turn “Modifier-only Activation” on to allow for launching via a single tap of the [command] key; others seem annoyed by that one. SilverFlow looks pretty slick… might have to check that out.

Definitely a fan of colored prompts, with the addition of svn/git info. Also like to have TextMate configured as my editor for commits, etc.:

export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagacad
export TERM=linux
export EDITOR=”mate -w”

parse_git_branch() {
git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e ‘/^[^*]/d’ -e ‘s/* (.*)/(git::1)/’
}
parse_svn_branch() {
parse_svn_url | sed -e ‘s#^’”$(parse_svn_repository_root)”‘##g’ | awk -F / ‘{print “(svn::”$1 “/” $2 “)”}’
}
parse_svn_url() {
svn info 2>/dev/null | grep -e ‘^URL*’ | sed -e ‘s#^URL: *(.*)#1#g ‘
}
parse_svn_repository_root() {
svn info 2>/dev/null | grep -e ‘^Repository Root:*’ | sed -e ‘s#^Repository Root: *(.*)#1/#g’
}
# http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-linux-unix-bash-shell-setup-prompt.html
export PS1=”[33[00m]u@h[33[01;32m] W[33[31m] $(parse_git_branch)$(parse_svn_branch) [33[00m]$[33[00m] ”

TextMate additions:

* [Git bundle](http://github.com/timcharper/git-tmbundle)
* [Ack bundle](http://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle)
* [ProjectPlus PlugIn](http://ciaranwal.sh/projectplus)
* And recently: [Ctags bundle](http://github.com/pivotal/ctags-tmbundle), customized to (hopefully) be more comfortable for Pivots
* Others (e.g., [Screw.Unit bundle](http://github.com/coreyti/screw-unit-tmbundle)), depending on project needs

Other indications that I might have been around:

* Synergy/Teleport
* OpenTerminalHere
* Firefox configured to download to `~/Downloads`
* A `~/Desktop/Stuff` folder, where I move the debris others have scattered

March 19, 2009 at 2:08 pm

Davis W. Frank says:

Logitech’s drivers so I can run my (Logitech) mouse with swapped buttons – so I can mouse goofy while not disturbing my pair…

March 20, 2009 at 5:46 am

Pat Nakajima says:

I’ll always install my TextMate bundle ([http://github.com/nakajima/nakajima-tmbundle](http://github.com/nakajima/nakajima-tmbundle/tree/master)), then I’ll pluck the bits out of my dot files ([http://github.com/nakajima/dot-rot](http://github.com/nakajima/dot-rot/tree/master)) that are useful without totally monopolizing all the settings.

March 20, 2009 at 8:06 am