Ubuntu file renamers

 I was planning to do an in-deep review of file renaming tools for Ubuntu, but instead I'll do a quick review.

 The best opensource file renamer for Gnome is Mètamorphose. It's hosted in Sourceforge, not the Ubuntu repositories, but still open source so it's cool, there is a deb file so it's super easy to install.

 It does, everything. It only lacks an scripting language but then again if you have python (or specially ipython) you have unlimited power, provided you are ready to write your own scripts and do your own rollbacks.

 It even does time  and date based renaming. And has plenty of options for special case selecting/unselecting, sorting, etc...

 It also has the best file browser, it doesn't have a context menu option in nautiulus but you can make your own one with the Nautilus Actions Configuration Tool.

 The only weird thing I've found is that trimming/croping is done with the options Search>Position>Replace>(empty string), but that's all.

 Now if you don't want to use software outside of the repositories (but it's worth it!) use PyRenamer.

 PyRenamer's file browser does use the theme icons but it doesn't show dot files/folders, it doesn't do regex. It has most of the options you could need, really, I do a lot of heavy duty renaming so PyRenamer was not enough for me, but it could be all you need.

 But, just the better file browser is enough to pick Mètamorphose.

 GPRename is a Perl/GTK+ option, but it's inferior to PyRenamer in every way, it doesn't do regexes, doesn't use icons at all, it can't HIDE dot files, this makes the file browser useless, it can't process directories and files at the same time, it has less options. Just no.

 Purr is the cutest of the file renamers here, it uses a little window with drag and drop support, which is cute and actually allows you to do renaming of files in disparate directories.

 But is doesn't provide any dynamic text modification options. It can add indexes without zero pading, it can change all extensions to another one, and it can replace every file name with a fixed string (plus an index number) it's simply not useful.

 So there it goes, after 221 days of delaying it I'm blogging about file renamers in Ubuntu.

Hello Bespin

 Last week Mozilla announced Bespin - the web development environment.

 Bespin is a web-application, you install it on your server. In a private domain I suppose.

 Its entirely written in javascript and instead of writing directly to the DOM it uses the not so-recent-but-not-very-popular-anyway canvas DOM element.

 They actually implemented a canvas/javascript GUI toolkit for this application, namely "Thunderhead"

 What's hot?
 - Portable environment.
 - Real-time collaboration over the net.
 - Project management for free.
 - Streamlined extensibility, extensions are installed with a single click.
 - Ubiquity like commands (i mean Quicksilver/Katapult/Launchbox/Launchy/Do/Krunner style)
 
 Now, the first concern for a javascript editor is, is it fast? It looks fast in the screencast, in fact they brag a lot about the speed provided by canvas.

 But that was running in a clean Safari, my heavily extended Ubuntu Firefox was sluggish as hell.

 Now Mozilla neglects Fiefox in Linux and I know I'm running too many extensions. I could install Epiphany but being a Mozilla product I can't believe they aren't going to laverage that advantage.

 On the other hand in Windows I have no option but Firefox, except closed source Opera.

 On an slithly unrelated note Epiphany-webkit crashes as soon as I try to visit any website so that's outta question too.

 I can't help but compare it to KomodoEdit. KomodoEdit has been my editor for over 2 years and I love it, but the open source version is stalled on features, and may never grow them as it eats into the market  of its closed source parent KomodoIDE.

 If Bespin gets more of the code inspection features that KomodoEdit is lacking I'll definitively switch, with the amusing implication that I'll have to use either multiple profiles or different browsers for bespin and my web surfing because of sluggishness.
 
 But with the new that Firefox 4 Will try to use artificial inteligense and natural language processing I think I'll finally leave Firefox after so many years.

Unix assumed

I was reading over the documentation for Jinja2 when I realized that they assume you are running a Unix with sudo installed. No instructions for Windows or for installing from tarballs are given.

This means that that every day more and more developers are using unix as a platform.
Now I'm aware that MacOS X also includes sudo, and I suppouse some flavor of BSD does too,
so this doesn't count as a victory for linux, much less Ubuntu, but at least is not a defeat, its progress overall for the future of free desktops.

You know what makes me really happy? And apt line ^_^!

Anyway, shouldn't there be a way to automate the inclusion of a repostory and installation of software? What happened to klick, autopackage and 0install? Those are very good proposals that haven't got enough momentum. However I think whatever default mechanism for installation Ubuntu adopts will become the default for desktop oriented distros, that's the momentum Ubuntu has in the linux community.