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Lately I’ve been updating some docs that we generate from YAML files and while I do like YAML as a format (beats the hell out of XML, but that’s the kind of bar you trip over), it can be really painful to figure out where exactly you messed up your indenting.

Fortunately, there’s an atom plugin for that! linter-js-yaml gives you incredibly fine-grained and helpful error messages. Isn’t that screenshot pretty? It’s got a nice obvious red dot and an underline and an error message that actually tells me what I got wrong! If you ever edit YAML, try linter-js-yaml, it’s awesome.

Since I switched to Linux, I’ve had to find a replacement for my beloved notepad++. I went with Atom because I like the project view in the sidebar and I’m too cheap to pay for Sublime.

Because I miss notepad++ so much, I’ve been slowly trying to make Atom behave as much like it as I can. One very simple plugin that helps me do that is selection-highlight, which highlights all occurrences of a word when you double-click it. For something so simple it’s really helpful, and something I missed a lot when I switched to Linux. Sometimes you just want to know whether the id you logged in a few different lines is actually the same, and it’s really nice to be able to do that with only two clicks.

If you use Atom, I recommend the selection-highlight plugin, and if you don’t use Atom, I recommend trying it out. It’s free and there are about a bajillion plugins :)