Sunday, April 09, 2006

Move aside ctags

When I first discovered ctags for VIM I started see the real potential of VIM as the only text editor a coder could ever need. ctags are great, you can quickly jump to declarations/definitions of functions, variables, macro's etc. However, today I realized cscope and it's described as ctags on steroids. Lets say you not only want to see where a function is defined, but you want to see where it gets called? No problem. Or what if you want to quickly jump to all files that #include a certain header? No problem. cscope builds a database from your projects source and header files not all that different then ctags. But it's the extra functionality that make this a keeper. From inside VIM type 'help cscope'.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Got wiki?

As this article agrees, wiki's are indeed hot. I will summarize and add some of my own reasons whyevery organization should have and use one.

What is a wiki?

* a website
* anyone can add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily
* term 'wiki wiki' is an ajective from the native language of Hawaii to denote something "quick" or "fast"

Benefits?

* facilitate internal team discussions
* maintain project documentation/FAQ
* reduce the amount of corporate e-mail
* single source of knowledge
* collaborative writing
* version controlled (easy reverts of changes)
* document changes are effective immediately to all viewing the wiki
* simple syntax
* support for tables, images, attachments, etc
* searchable

I have been using MoinMoin, a wiki engine, for ~8 months and it has proved amazingly useful and changes the way we share information in the office place.