Phillip Taylor's Blog

I believe the following statements:

• I am a professional software engineer
• I should be as efficient as possible
• Modifying other peoples’ software is easy.

People often deride the benefit of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as futile with the argument that no one really reads, modifies or understands the software. I appear to be something of an exception.

For those of you who don’t know what JIRA is. It’s an Agile project management / bug tracking web application. In short, the software that ties the code to the business requirements. I need to use it everyday.

I spend a lot of time at the command line. I use vim as my editor. I use git from the command line and I use irssi, a command line chat program. All of these tools are littered with references to JIRA. I figured if I hacked away at my Terminal, KDE Konsole, I could make my life much easier across all applications in one fell swoop. I seriously underestimated what a positive impact it would have!

So I had a poke around and came up with this patch to add JIRA links to KDE’s Terminal (Konsole)

It’s an atrocity in terms of good programming. Hardcoded URLs and Project names and awkward if statements. Don’t ask about the Regexs. As a Perl Dev, I know they aren’t top shelf. However it’s 90% of what I need and the goal is not giving something back to the community. It’s just making yourself more efficient at work. I don’t demand perfection here. “Good enough” has had an incredible impact on my productivity. A one page diff adds JIRA integration across the board.

Below are a selection of screenshots to enjoy. I’m working on a more generic version of this for Konsole by providing an interface for you to do this yourself. In the meantime why not hack on Konsole yourself. It’s easier than it seems!