The Yazi package manager ya will be used to install the plugins mentioned below, which is shipped with Yazi.

For the installation of necessary terminal tools, I will use brew, since I am currently on OSX. For Linux use the equivalents like apt.

1. MediaInfo

The MediaInfo plugin adds detailed information to the preview of media files such as JPG, PNG, and other media formats.

Especially Width, Height and Size is very useful.

Installation:

1. Install MediaInfo terminal tool using Brew: brew install mediainfo
2. Add the plugin to Yazi: ya pack -a boydaihungst/mediainfo
3. Add the necessary configuration to your yazi.toml file.

2. DuckDB

DuckDB.yazi is a plugin for handling CSV, TSV and Parquet files.
It uses DuckDB under the hood for adhoc rendering of the data files.

It can also render JSON files as tables, but I have not enabled this, because I want json files preview to just render json as is.
So I just added the viewers for tsv and csv in yazi.toml:

{ name = "*.csv", run = "duckdb" },
{ name = "*.tsv", run = "duckdb" },

3. Glow

Glow.yazi is a plugin for previewing Markdown files.
I uses terminal markdown renderer Glow.

Installation:

1. Install Glow: brew install glow
2. Add the plugin to Yazi: ya pack -a Reledia/glow.yazi

Note: the plugin is deprecated by now in favour of the new Piper plugin, a general-purpose previewer.
I might check this out as well in the near future.

4. Ouch.yazi

This plugin uses Ouch for handling zip, tar, and other archive formats.

Installation:

1. Install Ouch and 7-zip using Brew: brew install ouch 7-zip
2. Add the plugin to Yazi: ya pack -a ndtoan96/ouch
3. Add the “C” to your `keymap.toml` file to compress files:
   [[mgr.prepend_keymap]]
on = ["C"]
run = "plugin ouch"
desc = "Compress with ouch"

Simply press “Enter” on an archive file should uncompress the archive.

5. OpenWithCmd

OpenWithCmd is a plugin for opening files with specific commands, such as opening a file in LibreOffice. In Finder one would usually use right click “Open with” dialog.

Installation:

1. Add the plugin to Yazi: ya pack -a Ape/open-with-cmd.yazi
2. Add the “o” and “O” to your `keymap.toml` file to open the OpenWith dialog:
   [[mgr.prepend_keymap]]
on = "o"
run = "plugin open-with-cmd --args=block"
desc = "Open with command in the terminal"
[[mgr.prepend_keymap]]
on = "O"
run = "plugin open-with-cmd"
desc = "Open with command“

To open a file in LibreOffice from Yazi, type “o” and enter calc type:soffice --calc in the dialog.

Note that the window might not focus directly, and you may need to check if it is opened in the background.

This plugin overrides the `o/O` keymap, but you can still use `Enter` or `Shift+Enter` to open files directly in the default app.

Yazi can render previews for images and PDF files, but in my case, PDF previews weren’t showing up. Yazi requires Poppler for PDF previewing–and it was already installed on my system–the previews still didn’t work.

So I began debugging by running yazi --debug, which provides detailed information about your Yazi installation. Under the Dependencies section, I noticed a suspicious message:

pdftoppm      : ExitStatus(unix_wait_status(25344)),"pdftoppm version 4.0...

This should actually just render the version of pdftoppm by poppler like:

pdftoppm      : 25.04.0

So there was clearly some issue with Poppler and pdftoppm here.
Then I ran Yazi with a debug log enabled: YAZI_LOG=debug yazi
and checked the log file in ~/.local/state/yazi/yazi.log

And there was also an error:

ERROR yazi_scheduler::prework::prework: Error when running preloader pdf:
Failed to convert PDF to image, stderr: pdftoppm version 4.05 [www.xpdfreader.com]

It turns out that Xpdf was conflicting with the actual pdftoppm utility from Poppler. I had previously installed Xpdf for some reason, and it was now preventing Poppler from being installed properly. The error message confirmed the conflict:

Error: Cannot install poppler because conflicting formulae are installed.
xpdf: because poppler, pdftohtml, pdf2image, and xpdf install conflicting executables

So I uninstalled Xpdf via brew: brew unlink xpdf
Reinstalled Poppler via brew and now everything works nice:

A Sqlite database is only one file, which you surely have access to.
So just add a Database configuration to your IDE and point it to the Sqlite file.
Click on the Database flyout on the left side then on the + (Plus) and add a Sqlite configuration.
(IntelliJ has good documentation on Sqlite Database connection as well of course)

Then you are ready to go.
The UI of the database structure is quite good.
You can browse the tables by doublelick on the table in the database structure view.
Also you can edit values in the table view.
Note: When the DB was created inside the Docker container you probably dont own the DB from the host and you wont be able write to it.
While developing just change permissions on the host, if necessary.

You can also open a Database Console window where you can test queries.
This is particular better than using Adminer because these test queries are persisted and will still be there the next day.
You can add multiple database consoles and reopen them from “Scratches and Consoles” in your Project menu.

So no Adminer needed. Sqlite is just a file, dude.
No hassles with docker-compose anymore for DB administration and still using Docker for the app. :)

Update 09.08.2023:
JetBrains has now also uploaded a nice Youtube Video Tutorial on how to deal with Sqlite databases in IntelliJ IDEs like f.e. PHPStorm:
Working with SQLite Databases in any JetBrains IDE

I learned that you can now Drag and Drop Sqlite database files into the DataBase Pane and the IDE connects it directly, nice!

One thing i usually do on symfony projects in PHPStorm is to edit the “Directories” in the settings to avoid having results from var/cache or var/logs in the search results.

Also it slows down the search which i heavily use. So i exlude all folders that should not be searched because they are cache files or are redundant in some other way.

See this SO post for further discussion: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35654320/how-to-configure-directories-when-using-a-symfony-project-in-phpstorm

But in IntelliJ Ultimate its a bit different and it took me a bit to figure out.
Here the equivalent is located under “Project Structure->Modules”.
Here you can exclude Directories, set “test” and “source” folders.

Also it seems settings are imported from PHPStorm settings already when using a former PHPStorm project in IntelliJ Ultimate. Nice :)

When I first tried docker (docker-toolbox for mac) I was really disappointed how slow symfony apps ran inside the container.

I did a bit of research (didn’t completely get it though) – but most of the speed issues that people experience seem to be related to the rather slow file system access in mounted folders.

That’s where dlite really shines.
It’s an app that uses some sort of alternative to virtualbox etc. which has significant speed advantages.

I highly recommend you give it a try if you’re developing with docker in OSX.
Installation with homebrew is quite simple:

brew install dlite
dlite stop && dlite update -v 2.3.0 && dlite start
brew install docker
brew install docker-compose

Another thing I found quite challenging was setting up permissions when running symfony inside docker.
I found a couple of tutorials on that but none of those seemed to really work with my setup.

You could use data containers for the cache and log folders and don’t have any permission problems.
Or just use some internal folder `/tmp/myapp/cache` or `/dev/shm/myapp` (the latter really is fast…).

But any of those approaches will make it difficult to access the cache files from the host.
(I use PHPStorm with the symfony plugin, which relies on parsing some cache files)
It also doesn’t solve the problem of persmissions for the `/web` folders, when installing assets or write to any data folders you also wan’t to mount from the host filesystem.

I have not found a really elegant solution for that, but there’s a workaround which does work magic:

You can set uid of the www-data inside the container your host users’ uid.
Something like `RUN usermod -u 501 www-data` inside your webserver Dockerfile should do the trick for your default user on mac. You can then log into the container and run symfony commands as www-data and have no problems with accessing files from host filesystem, command-line or the webserver.

We put together a docker setup for symfony development, which should work across different operating systems.

https://github.com/nerdpress-org/docker-sf3/

So as a quickstart, after installing docker & dlite just run:

git clone https://github.com/nerdpress-org/docker-sf3.git docker-sf3
cp -r docker-sf3/docker /path/to/your/symfony-project/
cd /path/to/your/symfony-project/docker
sh ./docker.sh -l

(If there is more extensive documentation available concerning assetic + CompassFilter, please stop reading on and let me know!)

If you take a look at the filter class itself (it is CompassFilter in the generic Assetic\Filter namespace), you should recognise several option values that you can use in your application wide config.yml file.

But first you have to install the framework plugin following these instructions.

After adding the framework plugin by ruby’s own package manager “gem” (hopefully replaced by composer in the near future ;-)) by typing something like

$ gem install zurb-foundation

the only thing remaining to do is to load the framework plugin by assetic. To do so, put the folloging lines to your config.yml assetic section (as you would do it when using the compass command line interface, refer to the output of

$ compass help compile

.)

The yaml file should look like this:

assetic:
    read_from: %kernel.root_dir%/web
    debug: %kernel.debug%
    use_controller: %kernel.debug%
    filters:
        compass:
            plugins: ['zurb-foundation'] 
            # load foundation                                     
            # framework as you would do by typing
            # $ compass compile --require 
            # zurb-foundation [...]
            # [ ... ]

Now you should be able to import the foundation library files by using the @import statement in your *.sass/*.scss files:

@import "foundation";

Have fun!

jsPerf

Its basically a online benchmark tool for testing different approaches in javascript.
It covers some important aspects of benchmarking, that your homemade bench probably wont have like milliseconds accuracy & statistical analysis.
The tests are run on your browser and the results will feed the “browserscope”. A graph of the “highest known results” for the participating browsers.
So we can see some kind of comparison.

Almost all classic concurrent approaches are covered, my favorites are:

String concatenation

JavaScript Template Engines, in this revision its: juicer, mustache, ejohn, kissy, nTenjin
( yes it has revisions :) )

switchClass OR removeClass and addClass

fastest jQuery selectors to remove class

See if you can find some, you struggled with lately:
http://jsperf.com/browse

JsPerf has some further interesting options like
autorun
append #run to the URL of the test case

filters for the browserscope
filters are: popular, all, desktop, family, major, minor, mobile, prerelease

chart types of browserscope
append #chart=table to the test case’s URL
types are: bar(default), table, column, line, and pie

Give it a try, daily!

The twig-extension repository is usually fetched by calling

$ bin/vendor install

into your project´s ./vendor directory (because it is part of the ./deps file of each symfony 2 standard edition).

After installing the required vendor files, register the namespace fallback in your autoload.php (if you use the one delivered with Symfony 2 Standard, this should already have been done for you):

use Symfony\Component\ClassLoader\UniversalClassLoader;
use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationRegistry;

$loader = new UniversalClassLoader();
$loader->registerNamespaces(array(
    'Symfony'          => array(__DIR__.'/../vendor/symfony/src', __DIR__.'/../vendor/bundles'),
    // ...
));

$loader->registerPrefixes(array(
    'Twig_Extensions_' => __DIR__.'/../vendor/twig-extensions/lib',
    'Twig_'            => __DIR__.'/../vendor/twig/lib',
));

Remember that twig extensions are always registered as tagged services, but it is not always desirable to register a twig extension like e.g. the Debug-Extension as a regular service globally. We could do so by adding the service definition to the services.xml-file in one of our bundles. But due to the special purpose of the debug extension, we will choose a different, more “project-wide-configuration”-way.

Luckily, Symfony provides means to dynamically load services “on demand” and depending on the current environment.

Add the following lines to your app/config/config_dev.yml:

services:
    debug.twig.extension:
        class: Twig_Extensions_Extension_Debug
        tags: [{ name: 'twig.extension' }]

The “services”-configuration option may be utilized to register any class as a DIC managed service, for each project and independent from your bundle configuration (But remember that “regular” service definition configuration should usually happen in your bundle´s configuration files, otherwise you will not able to distribute your bundles because of missing or broken dependencies).

For twig extensions that should only be loaded for special purposes (like our DEBUG-function which is only needed in development environments), config_dev.yml is the perfect place to register them.

Note the “tags”-configuration which marks the service as a twig extension. Now, let´s create a demo twig-template and try the {% debug %} function:

{% extends "NerdpressDemoBundle::layout.html.twig" %}
{% debug %}

That will do. Open the page in your favorite webbrower (after defining a route, a controller and other stuff i won´t mention here) and admire the debug output. Note that the output will be much more nicer if you have had installed a native php debug extension like e.g. XDebug.

Actually its all said on the post itself: installation, features and restrictions.
So go and read it.

Its still a bit early stage and only runs on a nightly-build netbeans but it already has some helpful features.

For me i just like to have a node.js icon as my project icon ;).
No serious, i like the npm support, see image, especially for browsing the modules to see what is all available.

Whats also is nice and that you have the modules in the file tree and that they show the module info.

A GUI for installing the modules and editing the package file i dont really need but its nice to have.
Then starting the app from a button in netbeans is also nice.

I guess whats missing the most is code completion, maybe that will be added sometime soon.
I hope so, because having code completion for node modules would be pretty cool.

Tilt visualizes the DOM in 3D and is a lot faster than i expected.

Although it’s flagged experimental it’s easily installed and works like a charm on my macbook with Firefox 6.

Definetly makes you think twice about your markup nesting level ;)