Monthly Archives: November 2014

Slate – windows manager for Mac

productivity, unix, ,

I have discovered Slate – windows manager for Mac which is doing exceptionally great job in improving my productivity.

Begin with reading of this article from Tristan Hume on how to start working with Slate:

http://thume.ca/howto/2012/11/19/using-slate/

And here is slate by itself with full tutorial:

https://github.com/jigish/slate

Here is part of config which explains the idea:


config windowHintsShowIcons true
config windowHintsIgnoreHiddenWindows false
config windowHintsSpread true
config windowHintsDuration 5

bind esc:cmd hint

alias mon-laptop      1680x1050
alias mon-monitor     2560x1600

alias right-top move screenOriginX+screenSizeX/2;screenOriginY                   screenSizeX/2;screenSizeY/2 ${mon-monitor}
alias right-bottom move screenOriginX+screenSizeX/2;screenOriginY+screenSizeY/2     screenSizeX/2;screenSizeY/2 ${mon-monitor}
alias left-top move screenOriginX;screenOriginY                                 screenSizeX/2;screenSizeY/2 ${mon-monitor}
alias left-bottom move screenOriginX;screenOriginY+screenSizeY/2                   screenSizeX/2;screenSizeY/2 ${mon-monitor}
alias full-screen move screenOriginX;screenOriginY                                 screenSizeX;screenSizeY ${mon-laptop}

bind pad9:cmd ${right-top}
bind pad3:cmd ${right-bottom}
bind pad7:cmd ${left-top}
bind pad1:cmd ${left-bottom}
bind pad5:cmd ${full-screen}

Here is my full config:
https://gist.github.com/mgalushka/d79c68464f191ba8e11a

I use next combinations to manage windows:

cmd+number on pad panel – I use it to move current active window to corresponding position: to corners/half the screen up and down.

For window hints I use cmd+esc

Find process_id to be killed

unix, ,

Very often I need to kill some background job in unix.

To do this, I need to find its process_id to be passed to


kill -9 process_id

to be killed properly.

Here is quick way to combine finding process id for specific job:


ps aux | grep [my-fancy-filter-to-find-a task] |\
         awk '{print $2}'

This will just print process_id for my task to be killed.

Caution! Please, use this with care as if your grep return not the process_id  you are expecting – you may get to a trouble.

Watch git/mercurial branch in command prompt

unix, , ,

Sometimes this is crucial to not make a mistake committing in wrong branch.

To help mitigating this type of errors, just enable previewing in prompt the current branch you are on.

Following code works equally for git/mercurial branches, you need to put this into your ~/.bashrc file.

function parse_git_branch () {
  git branch 2> /dev/null |
      sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/'
}

function hg_branch() {
      hg branch 2> /dev/null |
           awk '{ printf "\033[37;0m\033[35;40m" $1 }'
      hg bookmarks 2> /dev/null |
           awk '/\*/ { printf " (" $2 ")"}'
}

PS1="$GREEN\u@\h$NO_COLOR:\w$YELLOW\$(parse_git_branch)$YELLOW\$(hg_branch)$NO_COLOR\$ "

For mercurial it also display current bookmark you are on.

This is how it look on my command prompt now:

Command prompt with git/mercurial branch