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The latest version of Screen (version 4.0.3 port revision 3) that comes with MacPorts has a number of issues.

Most annoying for me were that ‘mate’ and ‘gitx’ stopped working from the command line (with the errors ‘mate: failed to establish connection with TextMate’ and ‘gitx: failed to establish connection with GitX’ respectively).

The screen port @4.0.3_1 (version 4.0.3 revision 1) is free of these problems and, with a little bit of work, you can install this version via MacPorts. The instructions below are based on Joe Horns’ post, install old versions of ports using MacPorts.

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When working on web apps, it can really useful to be able to load production data into your development environment.

I am a sucker for anything that reduces typing so I put together a mysql_tasks rails plugin for my MySQL backed applications which makes it as easy as

rake mysql:refresh_from_production

Which makes a tar gzipped snapshot of the production database, downloads it into my development box and loads it into my development environment.

If you want to give it a go yourself then read these installation instructions for the mysql_tasks plugin.

This was inspired by the real Nate Clark.

Textmate’s indent functionality does a passable job of formatting your code BUT there is a great deal of room for improvement.

Inspired by the Paul Lutus’s ruby beautifier script and Tim Burks’s post on making it into a Textmate bundle I’ve put together a Code Beautifier Textmate bundle

It only supports Ruby at present but does improve upon Textmate’s indent functionality, in particular it is better at indenting multiline statements and cleans up white space.

It’s all hosted on Github so if you want to make improvements then please fork away.

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When working on a rails project I usually have script/server, script/console and autotest all running in GNU Screen. Jamie Flournoy has already described why using GNU screen is better than plain old Terminal Tabs.

I’ve put together a Screen Textmate Bundle to make it easy to configure and open per project screen sessions.

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CSV Builder is a simple little Rails (v2.1) plugin that makes it easy to write templates to generate CSV formatted output from your Rails application.

It does this by providing a little bit of plumbing gubbins to make a custom template handler from the FasterCSV gem.

So if you want to export data in CSV format from your rails app then install it like this

sudo gem install fastercsv
./script/plugin install git://github.com/econsultancy/csv_builder.git

This plugin was developed as part of project that I have been working on with Econsultancy.com.