BeTips.net

This tip builds on the information in the tip Title your Terminal. If you’d like the title of your Terminal windows to reflect the current working directory, you need to do two things: 1) Edit your .profile file (in your home directory) and add the line PROMPT_COMMAND=~/config/bin/term 2) Create a file called term (or use […]

You can use your choice of Tracker add-ons to quickly open a Terminal on the current Tracker window, but what if you want to go the other way and open a Tracker window on the Terminal’s current directory? There are a number of ways to do this, but the easiest way I’ve found is to […]

If you are bored of the plain black and white colour file listings when you type „ls“ in your Terminal, you can actually make the ls command colour the files based on their type (not mime type, but directory, symlink, etc) and extension. If you add the switch -C or –color to the ls command […]

If you want to apply a custom layout of attributes and sort orders to existing folders that currently have generic layouts, you’ll need some query templates — one for each filetype you want a custom Tracker layout for. By default, you should have several of these installed already — take a look in ~/config/settings/Tracker/DefaultQueryTemplates. Some […]

You can have the title bar of your Terminal session always report the current working directory. For example, if the current directory is /boot/home/Words, it will say that in the Terminal session’s title tab. Just add the following function to your /boot/home/.profile: function path_title() { echo -en „33]2;`pwd`07“ } PROMPT_COMMAND=path_title Open a new Terminal and […]

BeOS queries can make your life easier in ways you might not expect. This method uses queries to allow you to find and launch any file quickly, regardless the current directory. For example, if you’re sitting in a Terminal at /boot/home and want to edit a file living in /boot/home/projects/reports/March/daily… you don’t have to cd […]

After editing your .profile or UserSetupEnvironment, you need to „source“ or basically „re-read“ the file’s contents into memory in order for the changes to take effect. I’m lazy, and „source“ is 5 letters too many. Just type: . .profile (or . ~/.profile if you are not in your home dir) instead of source .profile Isn’t […]

Update: All of the principles in this tip still apply, but you can get most or all of this done much more easily with FlipSide’s MP3 Army Knife. Since you’ll probably soon be using a BeIA-based home stereo component to play all of your MP3s through a central home server, you want to make sure […]

If you find yourself frequently needing to get to a specific directory location in the shell and you’re already looking at it in the Tracker, download a copy of Sander Stok’s Summon add-on. Install it in ~/config/add-ons/Tracker and rename it with the letter of the hotkey you want. If you name to be able to […]

Update: The bulk of this tip is preserved for posterity, but in the editor’s humble opinion, is unnecessarily complex. If all you want to do is burn audio CDs, BeOS includes the „CDBurner“ application, which makes the process incredibly easy. CdManager is also excellent. If you want to burn data CDs, I recommend downloading WriteCD […]