TermHere Opens a Terminal Window Where You Want It

Termhere

Product: TermHere on the Mac App Store
Price: Free (Donation of $4.99 requested)

TermHere is an OS Service and Finder extension that does one job and does it perfectly. It lets you open a Terminal window with the directory highlighted in the Finder. You don’t have to move around the command line. Select a file/folder in the Finder, press a hotkey and a terminal window opens with the current directory as its focus.

There are a plethora of ways to achieve this:

Termhere>Toolbar

• Highlight a folder or file in the Finder and press the toolbar icon
• Highlight a folder or file in the Finder and press the keyboard command ⌘+⇧+X

Termhere>Contextual Menu

• Highlight a folder or file in the Finder and right click on it. Choose New Terminal Here.
• Highlight a folder or file in the Finder and invoke the command from the Services menu.
• You can open a new terminal window from links or paths written in documents, web pages, emails, and any other place supported by OS X’s Services feature.

The preferences for TermHere let you do two things:

Terminal Choice

Use any Terminal you prefer. Click on Browse and choose the Terminal program you want. TermHere works with Terminal and iTerm 2 and iTerm 3. Doesn’t work with Cathode and MacTerm.

TermHere Preference

To make it available in the Finder Contextual Menu, click on Preferences.

Terminal Extension

Select the checkbox next to Finder in the TermHere section of Extensions.

TermHere Donation

TermHere is an useful addition to a Mac users workflow. It is free but you can say thanks for the utility by donating $4.99 to the developer. You get to the donation window by clicking on the About button in the preferences window.

TermHere is recommended heartily.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie.

Accidents of Style on the Way to Better Writing

Accidents of Style

Product: The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly - Kindle edition by Charles Harrington Elster
Price: $7.99
Product: The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly: Charles Harrington Elster
Price: $14.03

I don’t remember being taught much grammar. Catholic school in India might have taught me the rules of grammar, but for some odd reason, I don’t remember any of it. I have been writing. All my life. The dominant rule was, “Does it sound right?” As long as it did, I was happy with it. No one complained. The grammar police didn’t break down my door, I was happy.

I started writing this blog in its various incarnations about eight years ago, and wanted for the first time in my life to make an effort to write better. I had no idea how to go about that. What is better? How do you achieve it?

I decided to do four things:

1. Write more. I figured it was a skill. Practice would make me better.
2. Edit. This is a skill which I am learning. Can a sentence be shorter? Am I using too many adverbs? Can I make this engaging? Is it passive? I must admit that this is a work in progress. I am nowhere near “good” at this point.
3. Read more. I have always read voraciously but I have broadened the subjects that I read now. I am reading books on writing. Reading books on grammar. Trying to learn a few new skills is how I see it.
4. Read critically. I am not only reading the subject but also reading the writing. I am paying attention to how authors write.

In the course of this journey I am coming across a few gems I will share over a few blog posts. Today’s candidate is an interesting book. It is written by Charles Harrington Elster and is called, “The Accidents of Style: Good advice on How Not to Write Badly.”

Remember I said that the rule I used to use was, “Does it sound right?” This implies that my ears can tell the difference between what is right and not so right. It means that even though I cannot explain why something sounds wrong, I know it when I hear it. Horsepucky. Doesn’t work that way at all. I am going to give you an example of an excerpt from this book to demonstrate how wrong I was.

Accident 1

Every day or everyday?

The confusion between every day and everyday occurs multiple times every day; it’s an everyday accident. Even The New York Times Magazine is not immune to it: “As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that’s what I wanted to wear everyday.” Make that every day.

What’s the difference? Every day is a standalone phrase that can fit almost anywhere in a sentence, while everyday is an adjective meaning “daily” or “ordinary” that always modifies a noun, as in everyday life, everyday clothes, and everyday problems.

The trick to getting it right lies in determining whether the phrase can stand by itself (“I think of you every day”) or whether it is tied to a following noun. If something can be used every day, it is suitable for everyday use. Some chores must be done every day, which makes them everyday chores. What’s the first line of the song “Everyday Blues”? It’s “Every day I have the blues,” of course.

Before reading this book, I had no idea what the difference was between “everyday” and “every day.” I have, I am certain, used them interchangeably. And I was wrong, some of the time. I didn’t know the difference, that meant that my ears didn’t have the ability to pick up on what was wrong. I didn’t know that “everyday” was an adjective that always modifies a noun. My ears, as arbiters of what is correct and what is wrong, fell woefully short. The book covers 350 accidents like this one. Some of them I knew. Most of them were eye-opening, aha-moments for me.

If you are serious about wanting to write better, you might want to read this book. It has taught me so much that I intend to read it a few more times.

Recommended heartily.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Set up Night Shift in iOS

One of the nice features of iOS 9 is the introduction of Night Shift. You turn on Night Shift to protect your Circadian rhythm, and to make it easier to fall asleep. Night Shift gradually reduces the amount of blue light emanating from your device as it gets more dark outside, and makes the settings normal in the morning. It protects your eyes and prevents your iPhone or iPad from telling your eyes that it is daytime.

Enable Night Shift

NightShift

Go to Settings and tap on Display and Brightness.

NightShift Enable

Tap on Night Shift.

NightShiftSchedule

Tap on the toggle next to Scheduled. Turn it on. Choose the schedule, I have Sunset to Sunrise as the period when Night Shift is enabled.

NightShiftControlCenter

You can achieve the same thing through the Control Center. By swiping up, from the bottom of your iPhone or iPad screen, you can bring up Control Center. Tap on the icon in the middle to turn Night Shift on. If you have it scheduled, the icon shows the state it is in, the daylight icon is different from the Night Shift enabled icon.

Night Shift is a great feature on the iOS devices. You can get the same thing for your macOS devices if you install an application called f.lux.

Both Night Shift and f.lux are highly recommended.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Writed Pro falls short of the competition

Writed Pro

Product: Writed Pro
Price: $8.99

Writed Pro is one of a new class of applications which are appearing in the Mac App Store. It is at its base, a distraction free text editor, supporting Markdown. It lets you export to Markdown, Word (doc and docx files), OpenOffice (odt files) and Rich Text files (rtf files).

With the subscription model under which Word is now available from Microsoft, there seems to be a need for apps which have the ability to deal with Word files without actually using Word. Writed Pro is an attempt at doing that.

You can open any Word document. It gets converted to Markdown syntax. You can work on it, and export to a Word document.

I have no need for this feature. I am and have been Microsoft free for a decade. But I can see why this has become a feature which is highlighted by these applications. Being able to read and generate Microsoft Word files is an important skill to have in the business world.

I have no idea how well Writed Pro does in converting the word files to markdown. I threw a few Word files at it, but they were not rich in formatting, it seemed to handle those fine. I don’t know what it would do with a complicated, densely styled Word document. Pages can read and export to Word files too. I prefer Writed Pro only because it converts Word files to Markdown and that is the format I live and write in.

It is a competent Markdown based text editor. Supports most of the usual Markdown features. Footnotes are not supported and tables support needs work. There is a rudimentary support of keyboard commands built into the program. For instance, ⌘+B for bold, ⌘+I for italic and ⌘+K for strikethrough. However there are no keyboard commands for some other things you do regularly in Markdown, for instance links, ordered and unordered lists. It doesn’t support system level keyboard commands for some commonly used features like full screen mode. The default command is ⌃+⌘+F, but Writed Pro doesn’t support it. You have to invoke the command through the Window menu.

The full screen is well implemented. The focus mode lacks typewriter scrolling, and true focus on paragraph or sentence as implemented by Byword andiA Writer. Both of these applications let you open Microsoft Word files, and export documents to the Microsoft word format. iA Writer like Writed pro also converts Word files to Markdown. Writed Pro is playing in a crowded field with some well established competitors.

The Competition Eats Writed Pro’s Lunch

In every meaningful criteria, Writed Pro seems to be the poor cousin of iA Writer. That might be understandable, Writed Pro is at version 1.0. iA Writer has had a few iterations and is now at version 3.0. These are the things Writed Pro does better:

1. Writed Pro has themes. iA Writer only has light and dark mode.
2. Writed Pro supports a few different fonts which are tied to its themes. iA Writer only supports its customized implementation of Nitti.

iA Writer is a complete markdown based writing solution, Writed Pro has a ways to go. You can read about iA Writer here.

Recommendation

If you are interested in this product category. Get iA Writer. Writed Pro only makes sense if you are severely resource constrained. iA Writer costs $14.99 while Writed Pro costs $8.99, but is often on sale for $0.99.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Don’t Break the Chain or Your Streak

Product: Chains - Packages - Package Control.
Price: Free
Product: Streaks
Price: $3.99

Jerry Seinfeld is the originator of this productivity hack.

To become a better comedian, he wrote daily. To motivate himself, he put a large calendar that had a whole year on one page on the wall. Got himself a thick red magic marker and everyday he wrote, he would put a big red X over that day. Soon he had a chain going. The only task left?

“Don’t break the chain.”

I got reminded of this by an article in Medium, where Broderick Turner talked about writing daily.

I use a plugin for Sublime Text 3 called Chains. It is a calendar for the whole year. You get to mark off the days that you have completed the task that you have set for yourself. Do this for a few days and soon you see the chain emerge. I am using this to help me write every day. The chain is 22 days old.

Streaks

If you don’t use Sublime Text 3, you can get the same help from an iOS app called Streaks. It is well-designed, and lets you track up to six tasks. It has links to the Health app, so, it is more versatile than a Sublime Text 3 plugin.

Both products and the productivity hack are recommended heartily.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie