Well, I think I’ve already mentioned how Circus Ponies NoteBook has made obsolete my paper notebook. Well, I came across TextMate yesterday, and I bought it today. It’s a pervasively programmable text editor that understands the language context of the text you are editing. It immediately reminded me of TurboText for the Amiga, but, frankly, TextMate is far better. It has handlers for tons of languages (including Textile and Daring Fireball Markdown (yay!)), and knows the difference (as a simple example) of things you’d want to do inside a string and outside it. How it tells that context is programmable, so it can conceivably support any programming language. And all the text and command macros it can do are programmable in your favourite scripting language (be it ruby, bash, python, etc.) I think I’ve typed my last vi command. I’ll write more on it soon (once I’ve got the drooling under control), but if you are interested, definitely take a few hours and read the online manual for it. I promise you, it will be the best investment of time you’ll make this month.

A couple of other points, while I’m at it. DarwinPorts rocks! I installed Subversion today with it, and it just worked. Even the output from the build system is pretty. I entered one command (sudo /opt/local/bin/port install subversion) and it took care of downloading and building everything I needed. Very satisfying. Better even than Pacman from ArchLinux (which was the last Linux distro I’ll ever run).

Finally, off a reference from the TextMate manual, I found CocoaDialog, which lets you open Mac-native (read: pretty) dialogs from shell (and ruby and perl and . . . ) scripts.

Have I mentioned that I love this computer?

Well, it’s been a busy several months. Been working on pulling a PHP application baseline together from my various code bases, getting back on ReThink, writing stuff for Turos (was: Arcturos, see previous post), etc.

I will eventually find time to write stuff about my Mac environment, but, for now, I’ll just say that I love loving my computer again. It’s been such a long time. Never thought I’d have to thank Steve Jobs for giving me back my Amiga.

If you have a Mac, I recommend checking out Circus Ponies Notebook, which is my favourite thinking tool. It won’t be for everyone, but it is exactly what I want. And Quicksilver just rocks for getting things done quickly. The documentation is a little lacking, but A Better OS X In Just 10 Minutes and From A Better OS X To Even More are a great help.

With the advent of the Intel Mac, I have finally decided to replace my poor old Pentium III machine with a MacMini. Something super fabuloso fantastic, I mentioned hoping for VMWare for the Mac to a friend this afternoon, and he pointed me to Parallels Workstation, which is already available! I was so excited, I preordered a copy. BootCamp from Apple would have required that I upgrade to Windows XP, something I am loath to do. So, YAY!

I guess you can’t deny your geekiness when you get excited about new software. Oh well, I have officially joined The Cult of Mac.