Musings from an east coast software developer, writer and reader.

From the Blog

Nov
30
Posted by JB at 11:34 am

A very close friend of mine released a new type of pastebin that has some very fancy features that really make it shine over any other interpretation on this type of idea. The client, which is written in Ruby and open source, is quickly installed through the use of the standard Ruby Gem installation approach. At this point you can immediately echo any code that you wish into the haste command on the terminal and it will be pushed up to a node.js powered backend which stores it, syntax highlighted, and returns a URL back down to you.

The web interface is simplistic, yet beautifully crafted to allow for inline text editing right in your web browser. Shortcut commands exist to create a new piece of code, save one, and tweet it immediately. In a single day it has climbed among the top spot on Hacker News, and is already getting some very constructive feedback. The fact that both the server and the client are open source allow for internal implementations to be rolled out without any worry to proprietary code being leaked to the outside.

I know he’ll be reading this post so I’ll gripe a little, and give my wish list:

  • It’d be nice to allow for a quick shortcut for tab spacing. I work in C/C++ every day, and like to have a little bit more tab that you have there by default. More tab please!
  • In the future when the Gist API becomes public it’d be really awesome to allow for forking, and pushing back up to your Gist.
  • An emacs plugin would be nice, but since I know at the main site itself, and of course, go download the client and the server and deploy it at your nine-to-five today!