Every time someone asks me for help for something geek on a Mac, I often prefer using the Terminal, because I never got used to editing a configuration file under /etc with a graphical text editor. Don't misunderstand me, I am not a Terminal addict, and I often prefer using graphical tools extremely integrated with Mac OS X: for example, I wouldn't code in C++ with something else than Xcode, which turns out to be an incredible IDE. But for some other things, I still launch this Terminal, and there are a few things in its default configuration I never liked, such as the behaviour of the keys page up/page down, home/end, etc.

So, let me tell you how you can configure your Terminal like I did on my mac, running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6.

When making some web development work, I used to use Screenshot Plus to measure the width of some elements. While this Mac OS X widget is very handy, it wasn't very appropriate for this job: it required me to load Mac OS X's Dashboard, activate Drag a picture in the widget, drag around what I wanted to measure, and finally drop the screenshot which was just taken. I thought it was a complex way to simply measure things in a web page, but I also thought there should a much better way to do that, which would be far more integrated within the web browser.

Well, I was right, since this Draggable Screen Ruler bookmarklet actually does the job quite efficiently, while also giving some useful information such as absolute position in the window. I wrote it a few days ago, and I actually use it every time I work on web design with CSS. You just have to drag and drop the previous link to your bookmarks bar, and you will be able to measure anything from any website you visit. To deactivate it, simply double click with your mouse, or press any key on your keyboard. Isn't it nice?