Jekyll development in zsh

A recent post on updating jekyll websites deployed on GitHub describes how this was done on a mac. Apple being Apple, and the advancement of technology being what it is, things have changed slightly such that the workflow needs a slight adjustment.

zsh

Recent OSX (now called MacOS) updates have changed the default shell programme from the Bourne Again Shell bash to the extended version of this, the Z Shell zsh. The first impact of this is that the rake command (or any command passing square brackets) doesn’t work any more:

% rake publish["Test update"]
zsh: no matches found: publish[Test update]

This is simply because zsh requires the square bracket characters to be escaped:

% rake publish\["Test update"\]
Configuration file: /your/path/to/GitHub/projectname/_config.yml
D	docs/yyyy/mm/dd/some-files.html
....

Two terminals

When developing, I use two terminal windows in the dev folder – one to do file operations and the like, the other to run a local version of the site while I test. The quick way to get the second window open within your current working directory is to issue this commmand:

% open -a Terminal .