Entries Related to ‘Utility’

The Vim editor is like a coelacanth – it looks impossibly clumsy yet somehow works. Take, for example, Vim’s undo and redo features, which, though complicated, can help you edit like a master.

If you use the Mercurial revision control tool, you can get more productive with the Mercurial extension Mercurial Queues, which provides an incredibly useful way of managing patch queues, including multiple and versioned patch queues. It lets you pop patches on and off your working tree to work on different things, or apply other people’s changes, as you need to.

The venerable Unix commands awk and sed are the ultimate text-file mixmasters. With these tools you can do useful tasks such as surgically change case, search and replace in multiple files, rearrange columns, and add and remove line numbers.

Drush, a Drupal command-line shell, makes a Drupal administrator’s job easy. It lets you perform internal cleanup, do a fresh Drupal install, install and enable modules, or create users, without the aid of a GUI.

The handy wget utility lets you grab web pages without using a browser, but it has many options you may not know about, including recursive retrieval, a slew of ways to handle connection issues, and a few ways to deal with websites that assume you’re an interactive user. Here’s how to turn wget from a one-trick pony into a whole circus of performing horses.

The command-line tool cURL, designed to handle URL manipulations and data transfer, lets you fetch the HTML code for a web page without resorting to a browser, and integrates smoothly into PHP and Perl scripts for advanced work.

Unison is a powerful file and directory synchronization tool that, unlike popular tools like rsync, can perform two-way synchronization. With Unison, you can kick off a sync job between your work computer and home desktop, and any changes done at one machine will be reflected at the other.

Last month we introduced ImageMagick, a software suite that lets you manipulate images in several interesting ways. In that article we learned a lot of ways to resize images, make thumbnails, and convert image file formats. Today we’re going to unleash more of the mighty ImageMagick power and learn to make drop shadows, raised buttons, and proof sheets, and generate different sizes of the same image.

Want a powerful, scriptable bitmap image editor that creates, edits, and converts images? ImageMagick is a suite of 11 commands and a GUI that let you resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, and shear pixel-based images. With it, you can adjust colors, create special effects, and draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses, and Bezier curves. ImageMagick supports more than 100 image file formats, and offers APIs for all popular programming languages.