During the last 3 week I have been back in the good old times of hardcore programming, this time against a bigger enemy: The Kernel! In the process I found this amazing collection of tools called YADR.

As anybody who has dealt with the kernel would agree, you really need to be serious about it when you want to get in a fight with it, and this includes counting on the right tools. As somebody who programs in a regular basis, I am used to my terminal, switching back and forth between my mac os terminal and my linux terminal inside a VM. This is pure preference – yes, I like programming in my mac- but sometimes, specially when cross compiling, the overhead of getting things to work in mac os is just too much in comparison to how easy things are in a  linux environment. However, sometimes I have felt that when dealing with a big project, my workflow was not that good. I spent way too much time “egreping” in order to find what I was looking for. There are many solutions to this, being the obvious one starting up eclipse – but it has its consequences (in my eyes sometimes it is an overhead in itself). Luckily this week I came across this awesome “pack of packs” called YADR, and I felt in love…

YADR – Yet Another Dotfile Repo – is a collection of the best breed tools you can find: vim, git, zsh, etc., all of them with a “touch” that make them way easier to use; and what is more important, fully customizable. Specially, vim is just… amazing! It keeps the vi simplicity, extending it with some awesome add-ons such as lookups, fast file loading and switching, auto-completion, etc.

There are way too many features and packages compiled in YADR, and the intention of this post is not to go through them. The intention is more to present this awesome environment to those who don’t know it, and that who will see the value of it just by being introduced. I am aware that this is not for everybody (there are better frameworks for people coding mobile apps, web, etc.), but for those scripting and C fans, I am sure this will be useful information.

Here it is the link to the github repo – just fork it and have fun. In my “myconfig” branch you will find useful patches that enable/disable some of the features. This is very personal, but maybe we share some preferences.

https://github.com/javigon/dotfiles (own branch)

If you are under mac os, I strongly recommend that you take a look at iTerm2 (http://www.iterm2.com). You will not regret replacing the default terminal with it.

Enjoy! 🙂

–javier