things that were broken

Contrary to the documentation, VirtualBox 4.1.8+ does not support the creation (on the guest system) of symlinks inside a shared folder -- at least not by default. Support can be re-enabled thusly:

VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/SHARE_NAME 1

Here's a handy trick: you can use biber in tool mode to pull citations out of a generated .bcf file, and export them in bibtex. And there is a switch that will eliminate crossreferences, by incorporating the data into the directly into the main bibtex entry:

Programming LaTeX3, packages, category codes, tokens and token lists, variables, mappings and functions

When you give a path spec to git checkout, it does not switch branches, but instead checks the indicated file out from the other branch. So one can merge changes to file from branchname into current like so:

git checkout branchname -- path/to/file

OK, but what if file already exists on the current branch, and you want to add a copy of the version from branchname?

Using the adjustbox package:

\begin{adjustbox}{center} you table here \end{adjustbox}

If you don't have any verbatim contents in the table, you can probably get away without adjustbox, like this:

p4merge is a decent visual merge and diff tool that integrates well with git, and supports 3 way merge. To use as an external merge and diff tool, you first need to download the executable (which is free). Then save this script as /usr/local/bin/p4merge:

#!/bin/bash for arg; do [[ $arg = /* ]] || arg=$PWD/$arg; absargs+=("$arg"); done; /Applications/p4merge.app/Contents/Resources/launchp4merge "${absargs[@]}"

Then configure git like this:

$ chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/p4merge $ git config --global merge.tool p4merge $ git config --global mergetool.prompt false $ git config --global mergetool.keepBackup false $ git config --global mergetool.p4merge.path /usr/local/bin/p4merge

Just like with the gitignore file, attributes can be set at the user level (by default in the file ~/.config/git/attributes), or in the repository at the directory level using a .gitattributes file.

For a LaTeX project, you probably want to set at least these:

*.pdf binary .gitignore export-ignore .gitattributes export-ignore *.tex diff=tex

Here is a quick .gitignore file for LaTeX projects. Add a copy to the root directory of your repository for project-specific ignores, or you can paste these lines into ~/.config/git/ignore to ignore these files universally.

Here's an excerpt from my .gitconfig file. You can create a user-level configuration file as ~/.gitconfig.

[core] ; default exclude file is ~/.config/git/ignore excludesfile = /path/to/gitignore ; can also set editor with $GIT_EDITOR editor = /path/to/edit pager = less --chop-long-lines [alias] co = checkout ci = commit st = status br = branch hist = log --pretty=format:\"%h%x09%C(white blue bold)%d%Creset%x20%s%x09%C(cyan)(%cr)%Creset \" --graph --date=short --branches --all --color tree = log --pretty=format:\"%h%x09%C(white bold)%d%Creset%x20%s \" --graph --branches --all --simplify-by-decoration --color type = cat-file -t dump = cat-file -p last = cat-file commit HEAD ldiff = diff --color-words [color] ; The colors might not work in Terminal.app ui = auto branch = auto [color "branch"] current = blue bold remote = white [color "status"] added = white bold changed = blue bold untracked = red branch = cyan bold [color "diff"] old = red new = white [push] default = simple [diff] ; how many lines of context to display in diff? default=3 context=1

Note that you can set values in this file from the command line like this:

If you are setting up a repo on the unix system to share with others inside the department, you need to set the permissions correctly so that they can access it. To give access to eveyrone in IT:

mkdir my_repo.git chmod +rwx:g my_repo.git

To limit access to just the astra group, you also need this:

chgrp astra my_repo.git chmod +rwx:g my_repo.git chmod g+s my_repo.git

That last line is critical; it recursively sets the group ID of subfiles and subdirectories. If you've already got a repo and you didn't do this up front, you'll need to also reset some things recursively:

Update — Stack Exchange's canonical solution for this issue is much simpler:

rm -rf `biber --cache`

Biber will occasionally (twice, in the past 6 months) stop working on my machine. The culprit seems to be a transient bug in version 1.8. The result is that biber simply begins to fail on every run, and includes something like this in the error messages:

Running Biber... data source /var/folders/m1/qbtvykm558z83gx42fg582_w0084sz/T/par-6a6f65/cache-1ea1c894d061cba85b64a1b380f6c297de02c7c4//inc/lib/Biber/LaTeX/recode_data.xml not found in . INFO - This is Biber 1.8 INFO - Logfile is 'bounded-domain.blg' FAILURE

You can fix this manually by deleting the cache directory from the error message. So for the above:

git diff --color-words will do a word-level diff, instead of the usual line-level diff. I don't know how to make that the default behaviour, but it's easy enough to create an alias in your .gitconfig file:

[alias] ldiff = diff --color-words

Then git ldiff mysource.tex will do the trick.

That's still not quite nice enough, because by default a command like \section{Introduction} looks like one big word. To get smarter word-level parsing, you need to add this to a .gitattributes file:

If you use command completion for bash, you should be aware that your git distribution includes a couple of interesting add-ons:

your_git_installation/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash your_git_installation/etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt.sh

The first file adds git to the bash completion module; all you have to do is source the git completion file in your .bash_rc file, and then bash will understand how to complete git commands.

git-prompt.sh lets you customize your bash prompt to include information from git whenever the working directory is part of a git repo. For example, my prompt looks like this:

(567)niflheim:~/path/to/repo[master *%]$

That last bit in the square brackets is the name of the current branch, followed by symbols to show that I have untracked files, and that some tracked files have been modified since the last commit.