Well, I’ve found a few things that solve some of my OS X problems.

• PithHelmet, an ad-blocking plugin for Safari. Shareware, which sucks, but only $10.
• I was going to sing the praises of Interarchy, which (allegedly) is a transparent FTP/SFTP client, capable of presenting remote sites to you as disks. This is similar to KDE’s IOSlave system, which I find extremely useful. Alas, that was not even close to the case. Interarchy mirrors a remote site and lets you edit it, then upload the changes. It’s completely useless, and if I ever lost control of my mental facilities to the point where I thought it was a good idea, I could use rsync instead.

And I’ve finally solved my text editor conundrum, by switching back to Emacs. While this goes against my instincts, and I’d prefer a slick OS X editor, there just isn’t one that works for me. And I’m really not asking for all that much; just syntax highlighting and built-in SCM with CVS and Subversion. BBEdit is stupid expensive, and I don’t care for it that much, jEdit is bloated and slow, Xcode is extremly clumsy, and none of the other editors even meet my two criteria. On the other hand, I found Aquamacs, a native Aqua port of GNU Emacs. It comes out-of-the-box with HTML, XML, CSS, and PHP syntax support, version control for CVS and Subversion, and works well. I also set up PHP function completion and argument lookup. It wasn’t my first choice, but I’m happy with it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Apple, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.