Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 44
August 10, 2019
Textastic linked on Astoundingly useful programming tools
This is a “powerful and fast text editor” both for iPad and Mac OS X. The iPad version has built-in SFTP support making it very useful for editing files on remote servers.
alias textastic='open -a Textastic'
If you’re looking for a better text editor than TextEdit, I can strongly recommend Textastic. It’s available both for macOS and iOS, and I use it extensively to edit files on my Macintosh remotely. It remembers where files were downloaded from, making it easy to get the latest version and then update when done.
Add this to your .bash_profile to make it easy to edit files from the command-line:
alias textastic='open -a Textastic'
And if you want Textastic to open all your text files, such as when using “open -t” in the edit script, right-click any .txt file and assign it to Textastic instead of TextEdit.
You can do all of these, of course, with any text editor if you choose one of the many great ones available for macOS.
August 7, 2019
Piano notation reference sheet
The “piano” script from 42 Astounding Scripts has several options. You can see them via the --help argument, of course, but here’s a cheat sheet you can print to card stock for easy reference.
August 4, 2019
The seventies like a shooting star
When creating ASCII art with the asciiArt script, you can maintain the color of an overlay even in areas where the photo is white, by using a block character instead of a space for the final character in the palette.
August 2, 2019
42 Astounding Scripts is live!
Ready to get your retro on? Type in programs for your Macintosh and make it play music, roll dice, and talk to you? Customize your services menu? 42 Astoundingly Useful Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh is the book for you!
August 1, 2019
Edit (Bash)
One of the first scripts in the book is a script to edit scripts. But that elicits a bootstrapping problem. Without the edit script, you can’t use the edit script to edit the edit script!
Character representation of grey scale images linked on Astounding ASCII Art
Paul Bourke provides a standard “character ramp” for photo to greyscale conversion, as well as a more convincing, shorter sequence. Discovering Paul’s ordering of characters for creating ASCII art was the starting point for writing the asciiArt script in 42 Astounding Scripts. Because different fonts will have different densities, I’ve since written a script that takes a font and puts its characters in order; that’s what I ended up using in the script as it appears in the book.
And I’ll have more about the densitySort script later if you want to use fonts other than Menlo. Stay tuned!
And I’ll have more about the densitySort script later if you want to use fonts other than Menlo. Stay tuned!
Nisus linked on Astoundingly scriptable apps
I use Nisus Writer Pro for almost all of my new documents now. It’s a lot easier to use than the other word processors I’ve tried. Seriously, Nisus Writer Pro is invaluable if you’ve ever felt like “the computer should be able to do this on its own” while you’re writing. First, Nisus is by far the cleanest and easiest word processor even without the ability to script it. There’s none of the clutter of Word or Open Office.
But add in the amazing scripting engine under the hood, and Nisus is unparalleled. If you can do it by hand, you can automate it.
But add in the amazing scripting engine under the hood, and Nisus is unparalleled. If you can do it by hand, you can automate it.
Sourcetree linked on Astoundingly useful programming tools
“Sourcetree simplifies how you interact with your Git repositories so you can focus on coding. Visualize and manage your repositories through Sourcetree's simple Git GUI.” (Also your Mercurial repositories.)
GraphicConverter linked on Astoundingly scriptable apps
“If you haven’t tried GraphicConverter yet, why not give it a spin? It’s one of the most useful products you’ll ever download and one of the best software bargains out there, from one of the most conscientious developers in the shareware universe. There’s really not much more you could ask for.”
GeekTool linked on Astoundingly useful programming tools
“GeekTool is a System Preferences module for Mac OS 10.5. It lets you display on your desktop different kind of informations, provided by 3 default plugins.” The plugins let you monitor files (such as error logs), view images (such as live graphs), and display the results of command-line scripts.
