Collin Donnell

Having something I know I want to do but then being stuck trying to decide on the technicalities of how I want to do it is one of the things about myself that frustrates me the most. I’d like to start a new blog. How should I host that? Micro.blog? WordPress? Make something with Rails? Maybe I build a static blog thing? Why isn’t there a good macOS native static blogging system with a GUI? Should I be the one to build it?

I’ve jumped between three different text editors even writing this short post. Do other people struggle with this? Some of it is probably ADHD-related, but maybe there’s more to it. If so, what’s helped you get past it?

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.