Thought I’d share this with you. Here are the commands I use to “do work” on WordPress.
Connect to a remote machine (usually I do development on my laptop, locally, but sometimes I’ll work from another computer):
$ ssh -l remote_username example.com
Make a directory:
$ mkdir /path/to/wordpress/
Browse to the WordPress directory:
$ cd /path/to/wordpress/
Use SVN to download the latest WP code to the current directory (which from now on, assume is /path/to/wordpress/):
$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ .
Update existing SVN checkout to latest code:
$ svn up
Search WordPress for a string (‘function the_content’ in this case):
$ grep -iR 'function the_content' *
Edit a file using nano:
$ nano filename.php
Make a patch, for filename.php:
$ svn diff filename.php > filename.diff
Make a patch for all files modified in the checkout:
$ svn diff > big_patch.diff
Apply a patch from someone else:
$ patch -p0 < patch.diff
My main text editor is TextMate for OS X, but I’ll use nano if logged in to a remote system. Note that all these commands work for OS X and Linux (you’ll need svn installed… check out Fink for OS X which gives you apt-get and a bunch of nice Linux-y goodness).
Update: Peter Westwood has a tutorial for Windows users, which I recommend (I used to do development on Windows, and I used the tools that he recommends!)