Great Mac Software

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?