cyborgworkshop.org

The Arduino IDE is a neat little bit of software that doesn’t have a ready made launcher for those of use in the unix world.   It’s easy enough to create though.

• Right click on your taskbar and select Add to Panel
• Choose Custom Application Launcher
• Type should be Application
• Name should be Whatever you want, I just use ‘Arduino’
• Command should be

bash -c “cd $HOME/Dropbox/Code/arduino-0012/; ./arduino”

This assumes that the arduino software is in a directory called “Dropbox/Code” in your home directory. If it’s just in your home directory, then the command would look like this

bash -c “cd $HOME/arduino-0012/; ./arduino”

• Now just pick an icon of your choice and hit OK.

Anyone on a Unix system that uses readline (most) should be able to use these handy little dance moves.

• Ctrl a          Moves the cursor to the start of the line
• Ctrl e          Moves the cursor to the end of the line
• Ctrl r           Context search of your history, hit ctrl r and start typing. Hit ctrl r again to scroll
• Tab             Seriously, you don’t know about tab completion?  How do you dress yourself every day?

Lots more of that here, but those are my most frequent.

sometimes, text files that are created on a windows system and then transfered to a unix system have a strange ^M (carrot M) character at the end of every line. This is because windows uses a different character then unix to indicate the end of a line or carriage return. Problem is that unix systems will try to parse those characters and otherwise normal files will become useless. Fortunately a fix is one command away. The Dos2Unix command takes an input file and outputs that file with all of the carriage returns corrected.

dos2unix $FILE

tada, purdy file!