http://norman.walsh.name/2009/01/07/handyUtilities 12 1 2009-01-07T19:11:46-05:00 Norman Walsh 2008 Norman Walsh For the New Year, three handy tools. Two for the Mac and one for everyone. In the past few weeks, I've found myself relying on three new tools. Well, knew to me, anyway. In case you haven't discovered them, here are three tools you should check out.

The first is ack!. If you find yourself typing: find src -type f -name "*.java" -exec \ grep PipeNameBinding {} /dev/null \; \ | grep -v \.svn or things like it, ack! is for you. Ack! searches over heterogeneous source code directories, knows how to skip revision control files, and pretty prints the results. FTW! The second two are Mac only. Probably not reason enough to swtich, but you never know.

I don't know how I developed web applications before HTTP Scoop. HTTP Scoop watches network traffic. It identifies HTTP requests and responses, parses them, and presents them in a clear, easy to analyze manner. If you need to know what you sent to the server and what it said in response, HTTP Scoop is just the ticket.

ExpanDrive turns any host you can reach through SSH (among other things) into a disk drive. Want to edit some files on your machine at work? Turn the home directory on your remote machine into a mounted disk and use your favorite tools. In fact, my favorite tool, Emacs, has this ability built in, but it's still convenient to be able to have such transparent access to any server.