NerdTool over GeekTool
September 6, 2011 at 10:18 PM by Dr. Drang
GeekTool went up on the Mac App Store on August 21, which explains why my various GeekTool posts have seen a jump in traffic.
I’ve been using NerdTool since I saw this Brett Terpstra post several months ago. I had to abandon it for a while on my MacBook Air when I upgraded to OS X 10.7, but I’m running it again now that Mutable Code has made it Lion-compatible.
Since GeekTool is free, and Brett seems to have gone back to it, I figured I’d run the two programs head-to-head to see how they compare. Based on a short test, I’ll keep using NerdTool, mainly because of this:
I suppose I shouldn’t be concerned about a hundred megabytes or so, but I’ve had trouble with GeekTool eating up memory in the past and just don’t want to worry about that again. For reference, both Tools were running my old Date and Time scripts and this set of Spotify scripts I wrote a couple of months ago.
Another point in NerdTool’s favor is its support for shadowed text. The Finder uses shadowed text for files on the Desktop and for good reason—it definitely makes the text easier to read.
GeekTool doesn’t have a checkbox to shadow the text, although I’ve found that you can edit an exported Geeklet file (it’s just a plist) and turn on shadowing. The code to look for is this:
xml:
<key>DropShadow</key>
<false/>
Just change that false to a true and reimport the file to get shadowing. Unfortunately, GeekTool’s shadowing looks like shit with smaller fonts:
The NerdTool screenshot is on the top and the GeekTool is on the bottom. Nobody wants to see the harsh shadowing that GeekTool uses.
Update 9/9/11
You can set and adjust GeekTool’s text shadow through the font picker. See Alex Reid’s comment below.
One advantage that GeekTool has—especially for people who just want to import a few nice Desktop decorations instead of building their own—is the Geeklet system. NerdTool has a similar system, but its exported files are binary rather than text and they’re given the dull and confusing name Logs instead of the cute and accessible name Geeklets. It would help if NerdTool could import Geeklets, but it can’t.
Since I’m all about building my own, the Geeklet advantage means little to me. I’m sticking with NerdTool until further notice.
