From the TextMate documentation:

4.5.2 Find Clipboard

Two useful key equivalents are ⌘E and ⌘G. The first copies the selection to the shared find clipboard. This works in the majority of applications and allows you to find the next occurrence of that string by then pressing ⌘G.

The find clipboard works across applications so whether in Safari, TextEdit, Mail, TextMate, Terminal, Console, or similar, one can copy the selected text to the find clipboard, switch application and use ⌘G to find that string.

One small annoyance is the labelling of the tabs. By default they are labelled with the name of the host they were opened to. This causes two problems, 1) I can have five tabs open to the same host, so I have to remember which is which and 2) I can connect to a connect to a second host and the tab still shows the original host.

On a whim (I had five tabs labelled “localhost”) I decided to check if there were a new version available that had labelled tabs. There was a newer version, and while there, I found a hint about setting the tabs if your shell was zsh and a link to a page of wgscott’s with similar methods for both zsh and tcsh.

Both those methods involved creating a function that was called whenever the directory was changed. They both contained strings of escape characters that were echoed on each chdir and the effect was to change the text on the tabs.

A simpler solution, that I think would also work in tcsh (I have no zsh experience) is to stuff the escape sequences into the PROMPT string. I did that in bash, adding the following to my .bashrc file.

 export PS1="^[]1;h:W^G$PS1"

where the bits inside the quotes are “ESC” typed with V[ for the first character and "^G" typed with VG. The \h and \W are bashisms specially created for the prompt strings and and the other characters are themselves.

In bash prompts, \h is the hostname, without the domain, and \W is the name of the current directory. There are many other options, see man bash. The environment variable $PS1 is the main prompts. Every time the command shell returns to the prompt, this string is echoed.

Works perfectly. I made this change, synced it to the hosts I use regularly, and no matter how I get there, the tabs labels tell me where I am in that tab.

Technorati Tags: cli, iterm, promptstrings

His point was about ripping DVDs, but the commentors are most interested in swapping the battery without powering down (or plugging in.)

Better yet, I don’t even have to shutdown and reboot to swap out the battery. I can just close the screen, do the switcheroo , and open back up the screen. I didn’t even know that hot-swapping the battery was possible until my first battery got so low one time that my PowerBook wouldn’t come out of sleep. I was forced to change out the battery without shutting down (which I had been doing for well over a month by that time), but to my complete surprise, things came right back up and nothing missed a beat. I wonder if there’s anyone else out there that still doesn’t know this is possible? Was/am I the only one?

(Closing the screen puts the Powerbook to sleep.)

There were some questions in the comments about this and whether it would work on iBooks. jdodds says no for iBooks and points out that Apple recommends against it.

Sure enough. The title of the linked article is “Mac OS X, Portables: Batteries shouldn’t be changed when computer is sleeping.” The first paragraph:

Attempting to change a battery while the some portable computers are asleep (and started up from Mac OS X) causes an NVRAM and/or Power Manager reset. Connect the AC power adapter before swapping the battery, or shut the computer down instead.

Compare this to the “Powerbook G4 15-inch Users Guide.”

If your battery runs low while you are working, you can put your PowerBook to sleep and replace the battery with a charged one. The internal backup battery provides enough power to maintain the contents of RAM for up to three minutes while you change the battery.

Note: If you have installed additional memory in your PowerBook, the backup battery may provide power for less than three minutes. Also, changing batteries several times in a short period can shorten the length of time the backup battery can maintain data if the backup battery hasn’t had time to fully recharge.

According to the article at Apple, the article applies to:

• PowerBook G3 Series
• PowerBook G3 Series (Bronze Keyboard)
• PowerBook (FireWire)
• PowerBook G4
• PowerBook G4 (12-inch) (all)
• iBook (all)

There seems to be a bug in this list since the G4 (12-inch)(all) would seem to be included in the G4 line.