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Leopard Love: "Go To" in TextEdit
TextEdit doesn't get much love. BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, and so forth grab the spotlight and all the attention. But I'm a TextEdit gal. I love the Emacs-like support and the price tag. For years now, I've resorted to Lorax's textextras to get "go to line". It's critical when you're debugging and you need to check out, for example, line 572. Enter Leopard. A new standard option in TextEdit allows you to select by line using the same Command-L, I've been using for years. You don't have to use the mouse. Type Command-L, the line number, and and press return. Sure, the error message for a bad line number is geeky ("Out of bounds line specification") but who cares? Line jump! Joy!
Leopard's TextEdit Thinks Different
Who would have thought that one of Apple's most memorable ad campaigns and Leopard's most talked about features would collide? That's right, Think Different and Resolution Independence have joined forces to bring us Leopard's all new TextEdit icon. Head on over to NSLog to read the lovely letter that John Appleseed (who is that guy? I'm getting a John Galt vibe from him) penned to Kate. You might recognize the text from those iconic ads of Apple's yesteryear.
TUAW Hands On with the Apple Keyboard
Yesterday I took a little trip down to my local Apple Store (the Michigan Ave. store here in Chicago) to check out the Keyboard. That's what Apple is calling their latest engineering marvel-- not the iBoard or the MacBoard, just Keyboard. I got a chance to check out the new iMac, and play with the new iLife apps for a bit, then I cracked open TextEdit and started typing. So what did I think? I wasn't kidding when I called it an engineering marvel-- the Keyboard is unlike any other keyboard I've seen. It is extremely, almost dangerously thin-- Apple is already making stuff the width of cardboard, and pretty soon they'll move on to paper-thin. It's not actually flexible, but I got the feeling that if I really tried (or just landed a heavy phonebook on it), I could break it in two. Probably not true, but I still felt that way.But you don't buy a keyboard for its durability-- you buy it to type on, and that's where I ran into problems.
Terminal Tip: Output man pages as plain text with col
Ever try to open a man page in TextEdit using man | open -f? You end up with the kind of unreadable repeated characters shown here. This all dates back to the days of dot matrix and daisy wheel printing when the only way you could produce bold type was to repeatedly print characters. Fortunately, there's an easy way to convert man pages into simple, non-redundant text. Use the command-line utility col with the -b flag enabled. For example, man col | col -b | open -f will open the col man page in TextEdit without repeated characters. The -b flag tells col to exclude all but the last character written to any column, ignoring any backspaces and repeats.
TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac
Some people balk at the idea of paying for a text editor. 'Doesn't OS X ship with a pretty good text editor called TextEdit,' they say. That is very true, but if you make your living creating text documents (whether they be code, blog posts, or content of some other kind) TextEdit just won't cut it.Enter TUAW favorite TextMate. This program is the swiss army knife of text processing. It includes a number of features that make coding and writing a breeze. It is a complex application, and as such the learning curve can be a little steep. The Pragmatic Programmers latest effort, 'TextMate Power Editing for the Mac,' hopes to turn you into a TextMate pro. Author James Edward Gray II shows the reader the ins and outs of TextMate, and teaches you how to get the most out of this great app.'TextMate Power Editing for the Mac' is available now. The physical book costs $29.95, the PDF version costs $20, and you can grab both for $37.45.
TextEdit data loss concerns
Over at MacOSXHints, Rob G. has posted a must-read article about possible data loss from TextEdit's Save dialog. The problem stems from TextEdit's (and Cocoa's) willingness to overwrite entire folders with text files. This data security hole seems to occur because "bundle" style files (which are actually folders and not single files) are considered on-par with flat files in OS X. TextEdit does not seem to check to ensure that the folder being replaced is actually a bundle and not, say, your entire home directory. It's an important article to read and a bug that you need to be aware of.
Automator Action Packs galore
In my newsreader today I saw an 'iPhoto Action Pack' from Automator World that adds a handy action for workflows involving iPhoto: "Find iPhoto Item Path". While debating whether that was TUAW-worthy, my newsreader became bombarded with more headlines like System Action Pack, TextEdit Action Pack, Preview Action Pack... until I finally decided to post a roundup to cover them all in one fell swoop. So here you go kids, a whole batch of Automator Actions that add some missing abilities to everyone's favorite (or the only?) OS automation utiliity: System Action Pack iPhoto Action Pack Filemaker Pro Action Pack TextEdit Action Pack QuarkXPress Action Pack Preview Action Pack Photoshop Action Pack InDesign Action Pack These actions, to my knowledge, are provided free from Automated Workflows, LLC.[UPDATE: Automator World's admin stopped by to let us know that some of these action packs are actually demos of retail versions of these products offered by Automated Workflows, LLC.]
Close brackets and braces easily with AutoPairs
If you're the type that spends the day staring at a display and typing code, we'd bet you'd appreciate any utility that will make the process easier. Check out AutoPairs. It's a Mac OS X preference pane that closes your brackets, braces and quotes for you. Type a left bracket, for instance, and a right bracket and left arrow appear. Pretty spiffy, especially when you consider that BBEdit doesn't do this out of the box.Note that, since AutoPairs is a preference pane plug-in, it won't work under Rosetta, though the developer promises that a universal version is in the works. AutoPairs requires Panther or better and is free.[Via ...on a long piece of string]
TUAW Tip: Copy text formatting
When I'm writing an e-mail or fiddling in TextEdit, I often copy in text from another location (Safari, another e-mail, etc.). Doing that, of course, copies the formatting along with it, screwing up the consistency of the document. (So, say I'm writing a 12-point Arial doc in TextEdit; I copy over some 10-point Verdana bold text from Safari, and all of a sudden I have a single doc with two different kinds of formatting -- and selecting the text and reapplying my previous settings is a time-consuming pain in the butt.)But Apple's aware of this hassle, and cleverly placed in a Copy Formatting feature, very similar to Word's Format Painter. Simply select the text with the formatting you want to copy and hit Command-Option-C. Now highlight the text you want re-formatted and apply the changes by keying Command-Option-V. Presto-chango, any formatting settings (face, bold, size, etc.) should now apply to all the text you selected. Neato.
