Hodgepodge
July 29, 2014 at 12:26 AM by Dr. Drang
A little followup on recent posts:
Path Finder trial
After what I thought was a fair trial of Path Finder, I’m back using to using the regular ol’ Finder again. I didn’t run across anything especially bad about Path Finder, but I didn’t run across anything compelling, either.
About a week ago, after a couple of weeks of constant use, I turned off Path Finder. My thinking was that if I missed it, it’d be worth returning to. I haven’t even thought about it until today—a strong sign that it just isn’t for me.
I know there are lots of smart people who swear by Path Finder, but this is the fourth or fifth time I’ve given it a trial run, and it’s never stuck with me. I won’t be trying it again.
Quicker Markdown linking with TextExpander
I got lots of comments on this post, most of which were suggestions for improvements. I feel guilty about the time people put into their responses, because I don’t use TextExpander to make Markdown links—the post was just a demonstration of how a little AppleScript can make your snippets more efficient.
I don’t use TextExpander for Markdown links because it’s best suited for inline links and I prefer reference links. The cursor movement and reference counting necessary for efficient reference linking is something that TextExpander just isn’t equipped to do because it can’t read the document I’m working on. Reference links require a system more integrated with your text editor, so I use a set of scripts in a BBEdit package. The reference link scripts are explained in this post.
The best thing to came out of that post was a link from Vítor Galvão to this wonderful set of AppleScript excerpts for getting the URL and title of the active browser tab for Safari, Chrome, Chrome Canary, Chromium, and WebKit. Turns out™ I could’ve been using a one-liner for the Chrome portion of my ;furl snippet.
Better Markdown folding in BBEdit
I’ve been writing long reports for work recently, and this script for intelligent folding of Markdown sections in BBEdit has been a big help in keeping the reports organized and keeping me focused on whatever section I’m writing.
I’d still prefer it if Rich Siegel recognized this as the right way to fold Markdown and incorporated it into BBEdit proper, but until that time I’ll get by with my script.
