[geeks] Apple software: the stuff you "gotta have"

[Micah R Ledbetter]

On Oct 9, 2007, at 23:10, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> My problem is I have vi programmed at very low levels in my neural
> network.  I'm still not sure what to do about a code editor.  I can
> use other editors well enough for things like email, even though it
> annoys me, but for other things I'm wondering if I'll want to try and
> get a "vi widget" to plug into other apps.

If you find anything that does this, let me know. As I've said  
before, I use Emacs, but I don't know anything that makes Mac OS X  
friendlier for vi people, and some have asked me.

NSTextEdit fields all have the Ctrl half of Emacs bindings, and there  
is something you can do which gives them the Meta half as well (you  
have to sacrifice "funny" characters for this, as it uses the Option  
key as Meta).

If that works, then perhaps there's hope for vi folks after all.

> Same here.  I like mutt better, but it is a bitch for handling IMAP,
> especially multiple accounts, and Mail works with a lot of the rest
> of the system.  It's really not as bad as I was expecting it to be,
> though it does have annoyances that I can't fathom.
>
> For example, I'd love to turn *OFF* flowed text and do it the old
> fashioned way sometimes.

Yeah, that's annoying, isn't it? The weird thing is that if you are  
composing a plain-text email, Mail hard-wraps each line to 78 (or  
something) characters. Yet, there's no way that I've discovered to  
let you see that at compose-time, where it would be handy to do  
formatting yourself sometime.

> When I use QS, I never see all the stuff that I see in the demos.
> It's just a fairly generic spotlight-ish program as far as I can
> see.  I guess that means I don't grok it either.

That's mostly what I use it for. It feels a lot faster than  
spotlight, because you're only indexing a few directories. There are  
a lot of things you can do with it if you try, though... there are  
plugins for web browsers so you can go to any bookmark or item in  
your history, and there is some way you can use it like `cat` at the  
command line, to append text to a file.

> However, I have found it convenient, so I use it.
>
> Actually, all day today I decided to give Butler a try.  It's about
> the same thing, at least as far as I've gotten into either program so
> far.

I felt like Butler was a little faster than Spotlight for me, except  
for the  couple of minutes of re-indexing time, when it seemed to  
bring my Mac to a screeching halt. Ugh.

  - Micah