Macos

It would be nice to simply click on a debug message and have it open Emacs to the correct location in the corresponding file. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, I chose to use terminal hyperlinks along with adding an Emacs URI protocol to my system.

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Strangely over the past week I ran into the need for a URI protocol handler on three different occasions. Instead of looking for three separate existing handlers that might work, I decided to write a single generic handler. The solution is a simple URI protocol router that forwards requests to shell scripts that handle the protocol requests. Below I describe some of the details; you can also find the end result on github: uri-handler.

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In a previous post Remapping My Caps Lock Key I mentioned that I remapped my caps-lock key to escape, but also created a "hyper-key" (ctrl-shift-cmd-opt) when the caps-lock key is held down. This opens up a keyboard worth of new shortcuts for emacs. Here are a few I have been playing with for the past few days. An alternative key mapping would be to map the hyper key to holding down the tab key, if you already have the caps lock key mapped to control, and thus muscle memory might preclude this mapping from working for you. [Read More]

If you happen to use Alfred, Pinboard, and Chrome, here is a nice extension to save the current browser page to Pinboard using Alfred. Much faster than any chrome extension, and fingers never leave the keyboard.

Tim Bueno's Pinboard Extension

In my home office I have a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. When I use my MacBook Air elsewhere in the house I constantly see connect and disconnect messages for these devices. Frequently toggling BT on/off can be a pain; the menu bar method for toggling BT requires scanning the menu bar for the BT glyph, clicking on it, finding the correct menu item and clicking on it. All that scanning, tracking, and clicking can be disruptive to a good mental flow; I wanted a quick keyboard shortcut to toggle bluetoooth on/off. [Read More]

Quick Look is a handy OS X feature where you can get a quick look at a file by selecting it and pressing the space bar. This is handy when looking through snippet files on disk. This plugin adds syntax highlighting in Quick Look supporting many common programming languages, and even supports R code.

I am a logophile, and regularly looking up the meanings of words I encounter on the web or in pdf documents. More recent OS X versions include a great feature that allows you to get a quick definition in almost any app (browser, editor, etc). Highlight a word and press ctrl-command-d to get the definition of the word. It is easy to configure to include Wikipedia definitions so you can also look up people and concepts. [Read More]

Doing iOS design and development I find myself capturing images on the iPhone all the time to make notes on. These usually end up being added to my notes or to our project wiki (see Screen Capture Goodness and Wiki + Searchable Notes for more on that). To get the images from the phone to my Mac I was using Apple's Photo Stream feature but it took too long and sometime images just didn't show up on the Mac. [Read More]