So you CAN disable swipe navigation in Chrome

Damn, I can't believe that I didn't think of disabling this dubious feature sooner. Can't even begin to tell you how often an errant fingertip brush makes my Chrome history go backwards (or forwards, for that matter). Turn that shit off with the following command in your terminal.

defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableMouseSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool NO

Make sure to restart Chrome for it to take effect.

Clearfixing is much easier these days

Hadn't needed to do a clearfix in awhile and thought I would have to do something like this:

.container::after {
    content:"";
    display:block;
    clear:both;
}

Or even worse...

.container::before, .container::after {
    content:"";
    display:table;
}
.container::after {
    clear:both;
}
.container {
    zoom:1; /* For IE 6/7 (trigger hasLayout) */
}

Then I was pleasantly surprised to learn that on modern browsers you just have to set the overflow property to auto on the containing element and you should be good to go.

.container {
  overflow: auto;
}

The most useful CSS printing directive

@media print {
    div {page-break-inside: avoid;}
}

Should be self-explanatory. Note that you can't use this property on absolutely positioned elements, but other than that, it pretty much works perfectly for preserving logical chunks of content in printed output.

Why Capybara requires button for submitting forms

Despite being a super common request, Capybara's API doesn't give you a way to submit forms directly (without hitting a submit button). The denial to do so is actually a principled stance, as you can read for yourself in this pull request. In a nutshell, Jonas believes its a bad practice to do so, plus there is no standard way to support the functionality across all browsers.

Workarounds exist, but seem clunky.

How Turbolinks handles redirects

When you visit location /one and the server redirects you to location /two, you expect the browser’s address bar to display the redirected URL. However, Turbolinks makes requests using XMLHttpRequest, which transparently follows redirects. There’s no way for Turbolinks to tell whether a request resulted in a redirect without additional cooperation from the server.

To work around this problem, Rails sends a Turbolinks-Location header in response to a visit that was redirected using redirect_to, and Turbolinks will replace the browser’s topmost history entry with the value provided. If for some reason you are performing redirects manually (so-to-speak, without using the redirect_to helper method), then you'll have to take care of adding the header yourself.

Exec a Login Shell

While setting up the Droplet that's hosting this site, I had to switch from root to the rails user several times. In order to get gems and bundler to work properly, I needed a login shell, which you don't get automatically just using su. The solution is to exec bash -l after su.

What I didn't already know is exactly why that command does what it does. Turns out that exec replaces the current process (my shell) instead of starting a new sub-process. So while just typing bash -l will also give you the intended result, it's not as efficient.

Use Axios for HTTP requests in Javascript

Axios is a slick promise-based HTTP client that works both in all modern browsers and server-side node.js. I like the simplicity of its interface.

axios.get('/user?ID=12345')
  .then(function (response) {
    console.log(response);
  })
  .catch(function (error) {
    console.log(error);
  });

...and the fact that it supports concurrent requests without too much hassle

function getUserAccount() {
  return axios.get('/user/12345');
}

function getUserPermissions() {
  return axios.get('/user/12345/permissions');
}

axios.all([getUserAccount(), getUserPermissions()])
  .then(axios.spread(function (acct, perms) {
    // Both requests are now complete 
  }));