vim and too many spaces

When pasting code into vim you can often get some really annoying spacing.

This first command re-indents the file as vim thinks it should be indented. Of course you gotta teach vim the file type you’re working with but that’s another story.

<esc>gg=G

This one deals with repteated (defined here are two or more) spaces characters within a line by reducing them to one for the whole file

:%s/\(\s\)\{2,\}/\1/g

Nokia Lumia 800

Be careful! This starts the Diagnostic Field Test and makes the “Diagnostics” app visible too for next time.

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Coder's Toolbox

Here’s a nice handy site: coderstoolbox.net

It convers:

• Time
  • Local vs UTC
  • Unix, ISO 8601, RFC 2822
• Strings
  • Base64, XML, URL, ECMAScript, Character set
  • Encode, decode
  • Output: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8
• Numbers
  • Decimal, Hex, Octal, Binary
• Networks
• Bandwidth
• XPath (beta)

"grep -o" - really quite useful

One really quite useful command is “grep -o” - it allows you to fire off something like this:

grep -o "Location supplier=\"\w*\"" locations.xml

And the output will be the phrases matching the regular expressions that start with “Location supplier=” with a double quoted word (\w) in the locations.xml file. :-) 

Piping content through SSH

Thanks to http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/content/4-ssh-config-tips-for-faster-remote-working/ I can avoid creating files which need to be scp’d: I can pipe the content directly:

local$ cat localfile.txt | ssh remote "cat - >> remotefile.txt"

For this to work, I have already got “remote” set up in my ~/.ssh/config. You can get much more involved in this: see

• http://backdrift.org/transparent-proxy-with-ssh
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-use-tar-command-through-network-over-ssh-session/
• http://scratching.psybermonkey.net/2011/02/ssh-how-to-pipe-output-from-local-to.html

My favourite example from the last site (execute commands on remote server but save the output to local) is:

ssh user@example.com "mysqldump -u DB_username -pDB_password DB_name | gzip -c" > /local/dir/DB_backup.gz