The nifty little add-on allows you to easily add a new Rails project, set it to development or production mode, and also restart it. It’s great if you are not sure/forgot where all the virtual host files are for your apache configuration.

As with all things in life, nothing is perfect. In this case, I work on a project with multiple environments: development, staging, preprodstaging, and production just to name a few. The passenger pane was great when you just had to choose between development or production but what do you do if your desired environment is named something else? Don’t sweat, apparently there’s a simple little trick to customize your configuration file exactly to your liking even if the pane does not offer those options. To do so, simply select the project your want to edit from the project list and then drag the it to your favorite text editor on the dock, in this case, Textmate.Now that the file is opened in the editor, edit to your heart’s content, save, restart your passenger instance for the project and you are ready to see your updated changes!

To install Open Terminal Here, unzip the downloaded file and store in a place that you won’t accidentally delete. Then right click (or if you don’t have a two button mouse, Ctrl+click) on the toolbar area of a finder window and select “Customize Toolbar…”. This brings up the toolbar customization dropdown. Now drag and drop the Open Terminal Here icon to the existing toolbear area and click done. You can now open a terminal window to the same location as where you are in the finder. For more convenience, cmd+click to open the current folder in a new tab in terminal or alt+click to cd into the current directory on the foremost tab of the foremost window in terminal. You can read up more about this cool script at Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu.

Mac finder window with Open Terminal Here installed