Multifile mode for text editors

Dear internets,

I’m a sysadmin/architect, which means I spend a good amount of time coding in puppet and other languages. Puppet is a great tool, however the puppet community is a bit anal strict about their style policies. I can respect this because I understand how important uniformity is when many developers are sharing code.

(On a side note, I absolutely can’t stand using spaces for indentation, but that’s another story. Please, just tell people to use tabs – preferably with a width of eight spaces.)

The puppet community has a habit of splitting up each class, subclass and function (“define”) into a separate file. When I’m hacking on a new module, I usually have everything together inside one big init.pp file until it becomes big enough that I need to split it up.

What I’d like to do, is have separate files loaded into my text editor linearly, so that as I scroll up or down with my mousewheel or keyboard, gedit or vim smoothly transitions me from one file to another. It would have per file line numbering (as usual), and a soft visual break when you transitioned from one file to the next. It would feel like a single file!

Interface wise, gedit could allow you to group tabs into this single “multifile” mode, which lets the native tab semantics (drag to reorder, open, close, see name) reorder, add, remove and view file name, respectively. Clicking on that tab would smooth scroll you right to where that file starts. I’m not sure what the grouping/ungrouping mechanism should look like, because this will depend on what is possible/sane with GTK+.

Gedit devs, can you make this happen? I will be a happy programmer/sysadmin.

Happy hacking,

James

Our fusion future

I always find myself reading about fusion. This time, I’ve come across an excellent Q&A on slashdot by some MIT Fusion Researchers. It’s well worth the read, and so is the http://www.fusionfuture.org/ website for some clear explanations about nuclear fusion.

Enjoy,

James

 

including a recursive tree of files with distutils

It turns out it is non trivial (afaict) to include a tree of files (a directory) in a python distutils data_files argument. Here’s how I managed to do it, while also allowing the programmer to include manual entries:

NAME = 'project_name'
distutils.core.setup(
# ...
    data_files=[
        ('share/%s' % NAME, ['README']),
        ('share/%s' % NAME, ['files/somefile']),
        ('share/%s/templates' % NAME, [
            'files/templates/template1.tmpl',
            'files/templates/template2.tmpl',
        ]),
    ] + [('share/%s/%s' % (NAME, x[0]), map(lambda y: x[0]+'/'+y, x[2])) for x in os.walk('the_directory/')],
# ...
)

Since data_files is a list, I’ve just appended our specially generated list to the end. You can do this as many times as you wish. The list is a comprehension which builds each tuple as it walks through the requested directory. I’ve chosen a root installation directory of ${prefix}/share/project_name/the_directory/ but you can change this code to match your own specifications.

Strangely, I couldn’t find this solution when searching the Internets, so I had to write it myself. Perhaps my google-fu is weak, and maybe this post needs to get some linkage to help out the rest of us python programmers.

Happy hacking,
James