I have decided to intensify work on private projects that I call micro projects, because usually they are small. Though I have a few ideas that would result in bigger projects, the outcome would be less successful because my time is already kinda limited. And that is intentional, because I do not want to spend the whole day and then the night in front of a computer. At work we use J2EE. I do not want to use this for private projects, because a) I use it every day b) I want to learn something new c) other programming languages widen your horizon which I think is important for a software developer. So here I am wanting to work on smaller projects using Python – a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively.

For development one needs an editor, I chose to use Vim (a while ago) because, well, actually I do not remember why, but I got used to the keyboard shortcuts and got to like its two modes etc. This post will not be about Vim, though if you have not tried it, give it a shot. Now to use Vim there are a gazilion plugins that make it easier / more fun to work with. A couple of days I stumbled upon a link tweeted out by (not sure) @jezdez about Janus – a distribution of plug-ins and mappings for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.

Meet Janus

To install Janus follow the instructions provided on their homepage. Once you got that done chose a color scheme that you want to use, for me it is Molokai:

$ echo 'color molokai' >> ~/.gvimrc.after

Now when I start up gvim to do some coding my screen looks like this:

And I actually do like that a lot, makes it fun to work with. You can see the Git branch this is on, you can use CTRL+T to search for new files (similar to Textmate’s Open File) and many many more features. I am sure I will figure out new features when I use it even more.

Install on Debian

As I am using Debian on my main Desktop machine, that I also use for development, I had to make a few adjustments to get Janus and its installation script to work:

1. Add the current user to the sudoers file, as the script will try to run something with sudo you need this and by default this is not the case on Debian.
2. I guess Janus was developed by/for Ruby/Rails devs mainly. It requires Rubygems to fully function. I got that working with doing: apt-get install rubygems
3. Well, a kind of a general requirement, though I already had taken care of it: git.

What do you use and why?

I would be interested in what you are using for your #micro projects? Do you have any? What kind of are these? Programming, hardware-“hacking”, building something, beating some kind of computer game? Tuning your car? What are you doing and what tools are you using to accomplish your goals? Let me know in the comments or @skohler me.