I recently discovered an incredibly useful function - you can look up man pages for keywords by pressing K (read: Shift + k) in normal mode when cursor is over the word you need to look up.

It works with any shell or programming language keywords, as long as vim recognizes the filetype.

I find the default cygwin color palette to be a bit ugly, so here’s one that has softer colors. Add the following lines to your .minttyrc and restart cygwin in order to apply changes.

ForegroundColour = 131, 148, 150
BackgroundColour =   0,   0,   0
CursorColour     = 220,  50,  47

Black            =   7,  54,  66
BoldBlack        =   0,  43,  54
Red              = 220,  50,  47
BoldRed          = 203,  75,  22
Green            =   0, 200, 132
BoldGreen        =   0, 200, 132
Yellow           = 204, 204, 102
BoldYellow       = 204, 204, 102
Blue             = 102, 153, 204
BoldBlue         = 102, 153, 204
Magenta          = 211,  54, 130
BoldMagenta      = 108, 113, 196
Cyan             =  42, 161, 152
BoldCyan         = 147, 161, 161
White            = 238, 232, 213
BoldWhite        = 253, 246, 227

Update (December 2018): This theme is now packaged with the default Mintty distribution! Pull up Mintty/Cygwin and check for a theme called rosipov (I didn’t pick the name).

Setting up Ruby on Rails with MongoDB on a Windows machine.

You need to have cygwin installed with ruby and git packages (obviously you may want to have more).

The following commands are executed in the cygwin prompt:

git clone git://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.git
cd rubygems/
ruby setup.rb
gem install rails

Go to the MongoDB website and download Windows binaries: http://www.mongodb.org/downloads. Extract the content of the bin/ directory to C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin.

Create a directory for the db files (the default MongoDB db files directory is C:\datadb):

cd /cygdrive/c
mkdir data
mkdir data/db

Done! Both mongo and rails are in your cygwin’s path now, feel free to tweak it as you see fit.

I’ve been giving preference to a keyboard over mouse since I discovered vim for myself, as it’s a faster and more convenient way to go. I am a Chrome user and recently I found an amazing plugin: Vimium.

It does exactly what the name suggests, allowing you to use vim-like commands in your browser. You can freely move, switch between tabs, work with forms and click links using familiar vim key bindings.

A two minute long introductory video explains basic commands and you’re all set! I’ve been using Vimium for over a week now, an amusing experience which allows you to throw your mouse in a dark corner (well, not exactly: Vimium still has some issues with over-bloated ajax pages, not to mention Flash and other nasty stuff).

Check it out: http://vimium.github.com/.

Today I had to merge changes from one repository into another. Let’s assume you want to merge beta into alpha.

Operations are performed in repo alpha:

git remote add beta_repo git@rosipov.com:beta.git
git fetch beta_repo
git merge beta_repo/master

In this case, beta_repo is the name you pick for remote.

If you just need to cherry-pick a certain commit from beta you can omit the last step and replace it with the cherry-pick.

More on the topic of remotes: http://git-scm.com/book/ch2-5.html.