Collin Donnell

I haven’t done it in a long time, but every so often it’s fun to look at the apps and tools I’ve been using and share that. A lot of these haven’t changed over the years, a couple are new, but most have stayed updated. Let me know if you discover anything you didn’t know about.

Development

Xcode

What I do 90% of my work in.

Dash

A documentation browser that is better than Xcode’s in every way. You can also download docsets for lots of other languages and frameworks, which is about 100x better than searching the web every time you need something.

BBEdit

My goto for anything to do with regular expressions and big text files. I also use it for proper programming and writing in Markdown sometimes if other apps are giving me trouble or not acting how I want.

Tower

A Git client that you’d be silly not to use. It does nearly everything you need faster than the command line.

Nova / Visual Studio Code

I put these two together, because I jump between them a lot. Visual Studio Code is probably the best Electron app I’ve used. It launches fast, the plugin ecosystem is amazing and for most things the code completion is untouchable.

Nova has the potential to do most of the same things, and some of them even better (setting up tasks is so much nicer), but with a much nicer and more Mac like interface. When Nova will do what I want, that’s usually what I go for, but it just doesn’t have the functionality yet and the plugins that exist are almost uniformly not as good. It’s also missing debugger support, which Visual Studio Code has. I’m looking forward to do the way when I can use Nova exclusively.

Proxyman

If you need to see what’s network calls are being made from your computer and what they’re returning, this is the best app for it. You can also write scripts that do things with the responses and replace URLs to return something else instead, which I used recently for testing image caching.

Paw

Paw is a great app that I don’t use as much as I should. What Paw is great for is creating a document representing all the calls that can be made to an API so you can test against it outside of your code.

Patterns

Still the best regular expressions app, but it hasn’t been updated in years. It’s only a matter of time before it stops working and I’ll have to write my own thing.

Audio

Logic Pro X

My favorite audio editor/workstation — and I’ve used a bunch. If you’re using GarageBand, just switch. It’s such an easy transition and you can do so much more.

Audio Hijack Pro

This is what I use for capturing both guest and my own audio for podcast recording.

Descript

It’s an Electron app, and it kind of sucks as an audio editor, but it has one killer feature: you can edit audio like text. It makes editing a long podcast recording so much easier than it would be. If this was a native app that had worked a little more like a regular DAW when you needed it too, it would be the coolest thing in the world.

Writing

iA Writer

I was using Ulysses for a while, but the fact that it hides Markdown links behind UI, and doesn’t exactly support regular Markdown got me off of it. iA Writer is a great app for writing things like blog posts when I don’t need to do a bunch of search and replace and other editing.

Marked

I use this for previewing things I write in Markdown. It’s inexpensive and way better than any of the build in previews in any text editor I’ve seen.

MarsEdit

Sometimes I write things directly into MarsEdit, but usually I write in iA Writer or BBEdit, and then paste into it. It gives a nicer UI for sending things up to my blog with the proper categories, etc, than the web interface.

General

1Password

This is where all my passwords and two factor auth codes go. It’s great.

Soulver

Soulver lets me write any math I need to do out as (nearly) English. Sometimes I use a regular calculator, but most of the time Soulver is easier and more powerful.

NetNewsWire

The best RSS reading app.

Acorn

My image editor of choice. Mostly I do simple things, and it’s always been the best for that. If I needed to do more complex operations, it seems totally capable.

Not Apps

Ruby

Since learning Ruby I can’t think of any reason I’d write a shell script. I used to use things like AWK all Shell all the time, and there’s no reason to for most things when Ruby exists and I know it. It’s the closest thing to “Objective-C without the C,” probably including Smalltalk.

Regular Expressions

You don’t need to be that good at regular expressions for them to change how you work with text on a computer. I might write a tutorial on them at some point.

I’m a man with a lot of hobbies. The stupidest one, by far, is hitting reset on my iOS home screen layout once or twice a year and reorganizing everything.

Today I found out you can do the same with your dock on macOS.

defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock

Reorganizing the dock is a lot less time consuming than redoing your iOS home screen. Sometimes it’s nice to have a fresh start.

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The time that I was the most fit was when I lived in Portland the first time from 2009 to 2014. The Apple Watch didn’t exist, and the most advanced tracking I ever had was a basic Fitbit pedometer. Since then, I’ve tracked a lot about my fitness. I have heart rate data going back years now. I can tell you my Vo2 max, which isn’t even a thing I knew existed before a few months ago.

Am I in better shape though? Would I be in worse shape if I didn’t have all of this data? I don’t know.

Beyond basic step tracking, I’m not entirely convinced collecting any these data has had any practical use for me or have made me any healthier. The reason I was more fit before was that I was riding my bike and walking everywhere. I didn’t need to track it to know, I know it because of how I felt at the time.

If you’re a hardcore athlete, tracking these things probably has some use. What if you’re just someone who wants to live a healthy lifestyle and feel good? Do I even have the expertise to turn these numbers into anything truly actionable?

Anyone who has tracked their activity before knows the feeling of leaving home for a walk or bike ride and forgetting their activity tracker. If you don’t track it, does it even count? But that’s ridiculous — tracking your bike ride isn’t what makes it healthy, it’s doing the thing. Wearing an Apple Watch that tells you that you closed all your rings today doesn’t change anything. In fact, I think it could be counter-productive.

Here’s why: once your watch tells me that I’ve closed those rings, I tend to feel done. I did the activity and hit the arbitrary goal, and now I don’t need to think about fitness anymore. If I don’t have that, the only metric I can use is how I feel. If you learn to listen to your body, I think it will tell you when you’ve had enough.

So, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not going to worry about closing rings. I’m going to wear whatever watch I feel like, I’m going to walk or bike whenever it’s an option to get where I’m going, and I’m going to let the numbers take care of themselves.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

BBEdit — it doesn’t suck, but it sure isn’t leading in features. I’ve spent a bunch of time with different editors, even reading a book on VIM once. I wrote about my experimentation with different editors recently, and most of what I said stands, except for that my experience with Nova is significantly better since moving from Python to Ruby for scripting[1].

I’ve experimented with Visual Studio Code, which despite my reservations about Electron apps, is obviously the frontrunner for editors with lots of features that are reasonably easy to use and configure[2].

I also spent time with TextMate 2. I know people who still swear by it, but while it’s still being developed, it doesn’t feel like something I want to invest in starting to use now. Maybe if I were already an expert, I’d ignore the UI bugs that don’t get fixed or the fact that most of the bundles are a decade old, but I’m not, so I don’t think I will (unless I change my mind).

So, here I am, typing in BBEdit. There’s other options. Why has app form the nineties that mostly still looks like an app from the nineties stuck with me?

What’s Good?

It never crashes

Being in the middle of writing code, hitting go, and having the app you’re using freeze up and crash really sucks. I can’t remember BBEdit ever crashing on me.

It’s fast

BBEdit loads fast so I can get to putting text into a window quickly. A lot of times I’m just pasting something to a temporary location, and I don’t think there’s a better option than BBEdit for that.

Regular expression support

All the serious editors have regex support. For some reason, BBEdit’s just feels the easiest to me. Pattern Playgrounds are pretty functional. The interface for saving a library of regex sucks, but that’s not such a big deal for my use.

Per language settings

I really enjoy being able to have a per-language color schemes and indentation levels. BBEdit does this better than anything I know.

What’s Missing?

Intelligent completion

Ctags are supported and work okay, but they aren’t context aware. I do really like that BBEdit’s completion will let me tab between placeholders. Xcode does this, but most of the other editors seem to stop at putting the name of what you’re doing in and stopping there.

Syntax awareness

Here’s a couple of examples that drive me nuts in BBEdit: If I’m writing a list in Markdown, and type an asterisk *, write something, and hit enter, BBEdit does nothing. It should insert another asterisk so I can continue the list, but, it doesn’t. Other editors have had this forever now.

If I write something like def my_method in Ruby and then hit return, BBEdit should be smart enough to know that the next line should be indented by two spaces. It’s not just a Ruby thing, I tried this with C and Python as well and BBEdit just doesn’t have this feature.

Extensions/packages/bundles

Whatever you call these, I want a way to easily add a new list of completions, or a theme, or language support to BBEdit without downloading a file I found somewhere and moving it to a subdirectory of BBEdit’s Application Support folder.

Multi-cursor support

All the other GUI apps have this now — even TextMate — and you know what? I like it. Column selection when you hold down option is not the same thing and the prefix/postfix lines window is a crutch at best.

A nod to visual appeal

Just a little one, please. Can we get an icon update for Big Sur while we’re at it? I don’t ask for much.

Still Using BBEdit

So here I am: using BBEdit. I keep trying other things, and I keep coming back. At this point I’m probably going to stop worrying about what editor I’m using so much and get back to work[3].

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Before deciding to come back to primarily posting on my own blog only, I’d been enjoying using HEY World. Something I was interested in seeing was what the usage of that looked like over time. Since I’ve been learning Ruby, this seemed like a great thing to write a script for and find out.

The first thing I needed, however, was a list of blogs. To do that I created a for hey.world.com links on Twitter, used Proxyman to get the responses.

I did a bunch of scrolling back in time to when HEY World first came out, copied the responses, and then wrote a script to grab all of the usernames of the blogs that were being linked to. I ended up with a list of about 523 unique blogs that had posted a link to Twitter at least once. Seemed like a pretty good sample to me. I was actually a little surprised there were that many to begin with.

I then wrote my other Ruby script to pull the feed of every HEY World blog I had, add up the global posts per day, and save them to a hash. Once that was done, I outputted it as CSV so I could see it in Numbers.

HEY World became publicly available on March 4th, 2021. On that day there were 212 posts, the next it was 194. Lots of them are just people trying it out to see what it is and then never posting again. There’s a lot of blogs that have 1-2 posts, which seems expected. After the first couple of days it trails off pretty quickly and within ten days or so it’s in the 20-30 posts a day range.

Of course the reason this is interested is due to the controversy surrounding Basecamp, and what’s happened since then.

On April 27, 2021, the Verge posted their article Breaking Camp about what had gone down at the company. For a couple of days, the numbers stayed around the low to mid twenties, which seem about average.

The last four days, however, they’ve dipped into the 12-14 new posts a day range. It could be normal, since there’s other slow days, but my feeling is that the people who’d remained using it (like me) pretty much stopped as more and worse information has come out about what was going on at Basecamp.

I’m usually not great at planning ahead. One reason I love Disney Land, but don’t have a big desire to go to Disney World, is it seems like you have to know that you want to ride Slinky Dog Dash at 11am on Wednesday three months in advance.

This time, however, I’m breaking my usual pattern. After being stuck in a house for a year, now that everyone is getting vaccinated, I want to get outdoors and do outdoors things this summer as much as I possibly can. The problem is, everyone else wants to do the same thing, and if I’m not careful, all of the places I want to go and things I want to see will be booked up. Here’s what I’m doing.

Prioritizing top places

Made a list of the top places I want to go and coming up with a plan to get there by the end of summer. These include Crater Lake, the Oregon Coast, and Silver Falls.

Researching alternatives

I’m lucky that in the Pacific Northwest there’s so many beautiful places you can go that aren’t one of those three to five most popular. I’m trying to find places which might be available on shorter notice, since placed like Crater Lake are likely to be booked out all summer.

Buying supplies when I see them

I have a list of supplies that either didn’t make it from California, or that I need to refresh. If I’m in REI, or wherever, and I see the thing I need, I’m buying it right away.

I knew I needed a new cooler, and wanted a nice one this time, so I made a point to find a Yeti I liked of the right size, and bought it. With the pandemic supplies are likely to be constrained for all sorts of things, and with lots of first time campers getting out there this year, things could run out.

After what’s been going on with HEY, I’ve realized if I care about the words I write, I need to be my writing from my own domain with my own RSS feed that I can take with me to a different blog-thing if I want to. I’m not making changes because of what I think of Basecamp’s actions, but because I don’t want the URL of my blog to suggest anything about me to my readers.

For now, the thing I’m choosing to use is Micro.blog. I’d been resistant to using it as the main thing I blog from for two reasons:

1. I didn’t know how to point the RSS feed people are served to Feedpress.
2. I didn’t know how to filter out my Micro posts from the RSS feed.

The first one is solved by a custom theme. It took me maybe five minutes to customize the Micro.blog theme I’d been using to serve my feed correctly. It even works if you put my URL directly into an RSS reader like NetNewsWire.

The second was solved by Micro.blog having a feature to get custom category feeds. It will even automatically filter posts to that feed that are longer and have a title, so I don’t have to remember to do anything special. All I did was point Feedpress to that feed, and I’m off.

Sorry if there are any repeat posts in the RSS feed. That shouldn’t happen again.

Yesterday around 2:20 p.m. I drove myself to the Oregon Convention Center, stood in line for about ten minutes, and was freely provided with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

I expected that I would be standing in line for some time and that the whole thing would be extremely disruptive to whatever I had planned for the day.

Instead, the line was quick and efficient, and afterwards I was able to make a follow-up appointment scheduled exactly 21 days after my first. My arm didn’t even really get sore.

If the vaccine is available to you, do it. If your state is anything like mine, it’s quick, easy, and most important, puts you five weeks from having your life back.

The Run Loop returns with special guest Gus Mueller to talk about Acorn 7, Real Basic, unit testing, and a lot more. It’s a good one!

Show page • Overcast link

Like any good computer person, I maintain a collection of dotfiles. Mine is pretty basic. I don’t use any crazy zsh package manager framework thing or external dependencies. I do have a bunch of aliases, however, that I think are pretty helpful. I’m sharing them here. I hope some of these are useful to other people.

LS Aliases

These three are pretty straightforward. You probably already have one or more of these if you’ve customized your shell at all.

alias ls='ls -G'

Always show colors for ls.

alias l='ls -lG'

Show directory contents in list mode.

alias ll='ls -aGl

Directory contents in list mode with color.

Package Manager Stuff

alias brewup='brew update && brew upgrade'

Update and then upgrade Homebrew if that was successful.

alias gemup='gem update --system && gem update'

Update all Ruby gems.

alias allup='brewup && gemup && mas upgrade'

Upgrade Homebrew, Ruby gems, and the Mac App Store together. If any fail, stop so I can fix it.

alias ibrew=’arch -x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew’

For the time being, there’s enough x86 only Homebrew packages that I’m running both the x86 and ARM versions in parallel. Maybe I should just run the x86 version for everything? For the time being, at least, I have this alias to run the x86 version.

Grab Bag

alias zshconf='bbedit -w $HOME/.zshrc && source $HOME/.zshrc'

Open zshrc in BBEdit and then source it after it’s done being edited.

alias in="arch -x86_64"

Run any command in x86 mode.

alias ded='rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData'

Delete Xcode derived data. Make sure you close Xcode before running or it will complain. Thanks Brent!

alias domains_grep="defaults domains | sed 's/,/\n/g' | grep -i"

Grep to find the user defaults domain of something.

take() { 
    mkdir $1 && cd $1 
}

Create a directory and change to to it.

• Hit ⌘R to run a script.
• Reasonable autocomplete.
• Auto-indenting as I type.
• Be a Mac-assed Mac app, or at least not an Electron app.
• Supports projects and individual files equally well.

• Electron apps: Visual Studio Code, Atom, et al.
• Non-Mac-like native apps: Sublime Text, CodeKit, a bunch of others, I’m sure.
• Java apps: So, anything by Jetbrains. They’re all big heavy IDEs written in Java that they look and feel like it.

• Nova, the new code editor by Panic.
• CotEditor, a free, open-source text editor for macOS.
• BBEdit, the venerable text editor from Bare Bones Software.
• TextMate 2, the once mythical creature, come to life.
• CodeRunner, a paid code editor that’s been around a few years.

After doing the bbedit ~/.zshrc followed by source ~/.zshrc a few times, I realized I could write this alias to speed things up a bit:

alias zshconf='bbedit -w ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc'

What this does is opens my zshrc in BBEdit, waits for me to edit the file, and then sources it once I’m done. The -w is the wait flag for the BBEdit command line tool, but most other editors I’ve used have something similar you could use.

Last week, I moved from the one computer lifestyle to having two different Macs — an M1 Mac Mini and MacBook Air. Using both is creating two points of friction I’d really like a better solution for.

The first is that I have a lot of little test coding projects that I start that I might want to use both computers, but which I’m not ready to create a new repo on GitHub for. What do I do? I can either:

• Keep them in iCloud Drive folder until I’m ready to move them over to GitHub? It seems like that would be okay as long as they’re not also git repos, since I’m told having repos in iCloud Drive is problematic, although I’m not entirely sure it is in practice, rather than theoretically.
• Have a git private git repo — “Scratch” — that I put all of my temp projects in to sync them across machines. If something graduates to its own repo, I’ll move the files out of scratch and set that up. A scratch repo is less ideal — because it means I still have to remember to commit — but it sort of solves the problem.

The second issue is syncing app preferences. The only app I know that does this without intervention is BBEdit, because of course, it does, but I’d also like my Xcode keyboard shortcuts, Terminal themes, and everything else to work this way. The best solution would be for this to be a feature of iCloud, obviously, but it isn’t.

One solution is I could add each thing individually to my dotfiles repo and use a script to set up symlinks. I do this for my actual dotfiles, and it works fine for those, but there are not that many of them — doing it for every app I want to sync sounds tedious. I also don’t like that I have to remember to commit and pull to keep things in sync.

I could also use this Mackup thing, which is a project on GitHub that claims to do what I want automatically, but which I find a bit terrifying to unleash on my machines?

If anyone has a better solution for either of these, please reach out. My goal is to pick up either of these functionally identical computers and use them without worrying about how they’re set up or where things are.