Reece Hart

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Highlighting the active tab in GNOME terminal

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

In recent iterations of GNOME terminal, the active tab is nearly indistinguishable from the inactive ones.  That makes it harder to navigate when you’ve got a bunch of terminals open simultaneously. Fortunately, GNOME uses a modified CSS scheme to control theme appearance, and that makes it easy to highlight an active tab. Here’s how.

Create (or edit) ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css. Add these lines:

@define-color ubuntu_orange #fb9267;
TerminalWindow .notebook tab:active {
 background-color: shade(@ubuntu_orange,1.1);
}

Then, exit all open terminals, and then open a new terminal and create a tab. With the above modification, you should see tabs like this:

GNOME terminal tabs

Using virtualenv, pip, and ipython

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

This page provides a quick synopsis on how to use three of my favorite Python features together:

  • virtualenv, which provides a standardized mechanism to isolate python environments (including in WSGI setups)
  • pip, which facilitates packages installation in virtualenv environments or otherwise
  • ipython, a terrific interactive shell with readline and debugging support

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Where is our (Hello) World going?!

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

Hype and evangelism run rampant in technology. That’s not to say there aren’t real and substantial advances, of course. One of my personal mantras is that simple things should be simple and complex should be possible. In other words, complexity shouldn’t come at the expense simplicity. (This isn’t a novel idea, just my own internal rephrasing.) With that in mind, I was amused by the following observation:

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