Taming a Supercar

I recently switched to MacVim for front-end development. Coming from Panic Software’s Coda, I was feeling extremely limited by my text editors capabilities. Two weeks into Vim, this designer has discovered the following:

Textmate/Coda/etc. are like the automatic transmission Volkswagen Jetta of text editors. The VW Jetta has just enough horsepower for daily tasks, some flexibility, but most of all it’s easy enough for most drivers to jump into and drive away.

Vim is like the manual transmission Lamborghini Aventador—the pinnacle of supercars. You can’t just jump into the Aventador and drive away, you have to learn how to control the 700hp, 6.5 liter V12 engine—quite a powerful beast. Learn the intricacies of the clutch, get used to the touch sensitive carbon-ceramic brakes. The tight steering and low suspension are a hell of a change from a VW Jetta.

I’ve been lucky to have expert Vim users around to teach me tips, tricks, and share their general knowledge on its power.

Have you tamed a supercar?

BBEdit “Projects” in Applescript

I really, really can’t decide between TextMate and BBEdit, the majority of reasons of which I should leave for another post. But anyway, one of the most annoying things that I thought was left out of BBEdit was the ability to save the contents of the Documents Drawer for easy retrieval. I like to keep my work logically separated by window, and it’s a pain to drag all the documents I need where I want them every time.

Thanks to BBEdit being very Applescriptable, I wrote these scripts. Stick ‘em in your scripts folder and they’ll get some use.

Save Project

tell application "BBEdit" 
    set w to first text window
    set theFiles to the file of every item ¬
        of text documents of w
    set f to choose file name with prompt ¬
        "Select a project file." 
    try
        set fSpec to open for access f ¬
            with write permission
    on error what
        display alert ¬
            "Could not save project." message what
        close access f
        return
    end try
    set eof of fSpec to 0
    try
        write theFiles to fSpec as list
    on error what
        close access f
        display alert ¬
            "Could not write project file." message what
        return
    end try
    close access fSpec
end tell

Load Project

tell application "BBEdit" 
    set f to choose file
    open for access f
    set fs to read f as list
    close access f

    set w to make new text window
    set show documents drawer of w to true
    set doc to ID of first text document of w
    set i to 1
    open fs opening in w
    close document id doc
end tell

It’s not gorgeous code, but it works. And it’s one less thing I have to worry about in BBEdit. Interestingly enough, I would have written these in Ruby with RubyOSA, but the darn thing won’t load BBEdit’s sdef because it uses non ASCII characters.

And for what it’s worth, I like to save the documents with a .bbdd extension.

More on the Mac

Ok, so I’ve finally convinced myself to use Safari. Now that I’ve gotten used to it, with the native UI widgets and overall good performance I wonder what was holding me back in the beginning – I’m still not sure.

For programming, I’ve been giving TextMate a try, but with the 30 day trial eventually ending (funny how that happens), I’ve decided to give something else a spin before purchasing it, so I’ve been using JEdit, and I must say that it is solid. It was key to turn on font smoothing (textmate spoils you in that department), and install some plugins before really being able to use it.