Rustic Code Chronicles

I like to code my Python scripts with Gedit . I have my "uber geek" alter ego who likes to code in  Vim , but I must say that I keep coming back to Gedit every time; I  just like it. Today's quick tip is about running python scripts from Gedit. It's a feature that comes in every Python IDE (or any other IDE); you just hit the corresponding key stroke and your script is running (of course with eventual debugging flags). To enable this feature in Gedit, we're going to use its fantastic "External Tools" which is the feature that makes the power of Gedit. Basically, the External Tools feature allows the user to extend Gedit functionality by executing custom shell commands/scripts inside Gedit. So, to make Gedit run Python scripts directly using a simple key stroke we'll need to provide Gedit with a shell command that does the work and map its functionality to a specific key stroke. We can access the External Tools Manager window by browsing to it thr...

A lot of developers that like to use the NetBeans IDE on top of Linux complain about its ugly GUI rendering, especially fonts rendering. NetBeans requires the Java Development Kit (JDK for short) to run, and bad rendering for Swing based GUIs is due to the fact that Linux distros chip with OpenJDK as the default JDK (almost all of them), which means no anti-aliasing for GUI and fonts rendering is enabled by default. The solution is very simple, though. We can make OpenJDK render Swing based GUIs with anti-aliasing enabled by setting the right option in the  _JAVA_OPTIONS   environment variable.  In a Terminal session, type the following command:  export _JAVA_OPTIONS="-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on" Almost done. To make the command global (that is, we don't have to issue the same command on every system session) we can add it to our   ~/.bash_profile . That's it. If you can make this tip better, feel free to add a comment below.

As a start for this blog, this is a video.