One more in the series of let-me-jot-this-down-cause-I-forget-easily articles

In the blog’s hiatus time I managed to switch from Textmate to SublimeText.

The reason for switching has to do with SublimeText’s availability on all platforms I work with (namely I can get it to work on Windows). I’ve come to really like this editor with it’s simple JSON configuration and the lightning fast search facilities it offers. And I find increasingly annoying the need to switch outside the editor to perform tasks on the console.

Luckily SublimeText has a nice and simple (again JSON based) batch execution system (called a Build System). Instead of duplicating knowledge I myself have found somewhere else, go check this article by Addy Osmani which explains things very well.

Now, switching the blog to jekyll also means I spent a lot more time within SublimeText when I write blogs. In typically lazy fashion I switched to the terminal for jekyll build. This got old very fast, so I was looking for a way to get a build system to work.

The first thing was to call jekyll build directly, which went south pretty fast since I use rvm. The default OS X Ruby installation has actually never been used on my current machine.

Using Addy’s article I figured out how to set the environment to set the rvm path. Now, instead of using rvm-auto-ruby I just set the rvm default to the ruby version I use for my personal projects. All other installations don’t have the jekyll gem anyway.

And instead of creating a build system for jekyll I just created a rakefile that calls jekyll build and used the following as a build system

{
  "env":{
      "PATH":"${HOME}/.rvm/bin:${PATH}",
      "LC_CTYPE":"UTF-8"
  },
  "cmd": ["rake"],
  "file_regex": "^(...*?):([0-9]*):?([0-9]*)"
}

That “LC_CTYPE”:”UTF-8” is crucial, especially with the various greek, german and spanish UTF-8 characters loose on this blog. Jekyll chokes very fast (article number 3 to be exact) if it’s not set.

The beauty of it is that the standard Ruby regex for errors still works and stacktraces are clickable and open the correct file within the editor. Sweet!