Now to dive into the subject of this article, one of the new features in Rails 3 that I really like is the use of UJS (Unobtrusive JavaScript) taking away all the inline Javascript that was generated by Rails inline within your HTML. UJS has many advantages over inline Javascript, the main advantages in my opinion being that Javascript is now no longer treated as a second class citizen, more easily managed (because it isn’t all over the place anymore) and that it makes it easier to build pages that work with and without Javascript.

For those of us that have been using the existing AJAX functionality in Rails 1 and Rails 2 it involves a bit of work. Helper methods such as link_to_remote and remote_form_for have been taken away, instead you now specify :remote => true as part of the options to the helpers that they were AJAX alternates for (such as link_to and form_for). Specifying the :remote => true option adds a custom attribute to the tag: data-remote=”true”. Javascript event observing is used to properly trigger the AJAX requests on click or submit (depending on which helper it’s being used on). If you take a look at the file public/javascripts/rails.js you’ll see how it works exactly (assuming that you understand Javascript and the Prototype framework).

The standard callbacks that used to exist as part of the remote functions are now gone too (you could pass in options such as :success, :failure, :before, :after, etc.), instead you will have to program them in Javascript. One of the upsides is that you can specify global behavior for all your AJAX requests by observing the “ajax:*” events (public/javascript/rails.js details which ones are fired). This can be incredibly useful per example when you want to show a spinner for your AJAX requests, you simply observe the “ajax:before” and “ajax:after” to show and hide the spinner in application.js (making this behavior available on all your pages instantly, very DRY!). You could even influence the behavior for each AJAX request with additional custom data attributes (per example the id of the spinner to show and hide).

if has('win16') || has('win32') || has('win64') || has('win95')
 " Windows specific settings
 " Backup and swap file directories
 set bdir=~/vimbackups
 set dir=~/Temp
 " Use PuTTY SSH programs (Must be installed separately)
 let g:netrw_scp_cmd = 'pscp.exe -q -batch -agent'
 let g:netrw_sftp_cmd= 'psftp.exe'
 " When using SCP ensure that you don't get prompting DOS windows
 let g:netrw_silent= 1
else
 " *nix specific settings
 " Backup and swap file directories
 set bdir=~/.vimbackups
 set dir=~/.vimtmp
endif

Happy Vimming!

With CTRL+V (while in normal mode) you can activate the visual block mode, by using the standard movement keys (h, j, k, l or the arrow keys). You can perform various operations on visual blocks (check the help with :help v), in this article I will describe how you can prepend or append text to a block.

After selecting your block you can press SHIFT+i to start inserting before every line of the block, after you type what you want to insert hit the ESC key to apply the insert to all the lines. The below images show you how this would work:

Visual mode active, selected a block

Insert mode activated (using SHIFT+i) and typed a "

Hit the ESC key to apply the insert

To append instead you can press SHIFT+a instead of SHIFT+i, the mechanism is exactly the same:

Visual mode active, selected a block

Append mode activated (using SHIFT+a) and typed a "

Hit the ESC key to apply the append

As you can see in the above example white space is appended to Dog and Cat, because these words are shorter than Bird. If you don’t want that white space you can use CTRL+V $ instead of CTRL+V to activate visual mode:

Visual mode active, selected a block

Append mode activated (using SHIFT+a) and typed a "

Hit ESC to apply the append

As noted earlier in the article there are more thing that you can do with visual mode in vim, you can read about it in Vim’s help using “:help v”.

Happy Vimming!

• USB flash drive of the appropriate size (I used a 6GB drive)
• Windows Vista install DVD
• Computer that has Windows Vista installed, a DVD drive and has a free USB slot (for use with the USB flash drive)

Open the command prompt on the computer that is already running Windows Vista (cmd.exe) and start “diskpart” (Yes, Windows XP also has diskpart, however the version I had on my XP box didn’t allow me to make flash drives bootable). diskpart gives you it’s own command prompt, identify the flash drive by typing “list disk”. Once you have determined which disk is the flash drive type “select disk x”, where x is the number in the list returned by diskpart. Type the following commands:

• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=fat32
• assign
• exit

The above commands will remove any existing partitions from the selected disk (which is why it is important that you are absolutely certain that you selected the correct disk, if you mess this up any data that was on the drive is gone!), create a new primary partition, make it bootable, format it as a FAT32 disk, assign it a drive letter, and then exit the diskpart program.

Open Windows explorer to identify what drive letter the USB flash drive now has. Insert the Windows Vista installation DVD in your DVD drive. Go back to the command prompt and type the following command: “xcopy x:\*.* /s /e /f y:\” (where x is the drive letter of your DVD drive and y is the drive letter of your USB flash drive). Once the xcopy command is complete your USB flash drive is ready!

Note: When installing Windows Vista on a computer with multiple hard drives Windows Vista will refuse to install on any other disk than the first (in my experience at least).

Click on any of the existing menus and then click on the “New Item” button:

Once you’ve filled out the above fields and have clicked on the “OK” button the option will be added to your menu. You can give the option an icon by clicking the icon on the top left of the dialog (this allows you to browse for a picture to use).

Keyboard Shortcuts screen

The screen that pops up should look like the one in the screenshot above. If you look through the existing shortcut keys you’ll see some useful defaults, such as <Control>+<Alt>+L to lock your screen. The keyboard shortcuts editor is user friendly, if you choose a combination that is already taken you will be warned like so:

Warning dialog

One of the programs that I tend to use a lot is the terminal, there’s a shortcut defined to run the terminal but it has no shortcut key assigned to it by default as you can see in the screenshot below:

Run in terminal is disabled

You can set the shortcut key by clicking on the row, which will change the text to “New shortcut…” and then press whichever key combination that you want to use, which in my case is <Control>+<Alt>+T:

Run in terminal set to ++T

Pressing <Control>+<Alt>+T now opens up a new terminal window, very convenient!

In addition to setting shortcut keys for existing actions, you can add your own by clicking the “Add” button, which gives the below dialog:

Add custom shortcut dialog

Say we want to run Firefox with a shortcut key, I’ll fill in the screen like so:

Filled in custom shortcut dialog

After clicking the “Apply” button the action is added to the category “Custom Shortcuts”:

Custom shortcut added

You can set shortcut keys to these new actions like standard ones. If you want to change the name of a custom shortcut key, simply click the name to get the dialog to change the name (which looks exactly like the add dialog, but with the current values pre-populated). For custom shortcuts the “Remove” button is enabled, which allows you to delete them (the default shortcuts can’t be removed). Note that custom shortcuts are removed without warning!

• Right click on a text file and choose “Open with Other Application” and select gvim from the list of applications
• Close the file that you are editing (unless you actually wanted to edit it)
• Open a terminal and go to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the file mimeapps.list, it will look something like this:

[Added Associations]
text/plain=gedit.desktop;gvim.desktop;openoffice.org-writer.desktop;

To make gvim your default simply re-order the list and put gvim.desktop as the first entry like so:

[Added Associations]
text/plain=gvim.desktop;gedit.desktop;openoffice.org-writer.desktop;

For these changes to take effect you will either have to restart Nautilus yourself by executing “killall nautilus” (which has the downside that your desktop will no longer work until you log out and back in), or just log out and log back in.