Introduction

Setting up a new Mac can be fun, but time consuming too. As I scan the icons in my dock, I see several that will not be there when I upgrade to Mountain Lion. As well compartmentalized as OS X is, and as well as it handles applications, I still like to keep things as clean as possible.

Part of keeping things clean is using the applications that ship with OS X. I use Safari for my browser, with my own setup, Mail for Email, iChat for instant messaging, and iCal for my calendar. All of my music is in iTunes, including my Grateful Dead collection. If Apple shipped a decent Twitter client and RSS feed reader, I’d use those too, but since they don’t, this is where my short list of third party applications starts.

For Twitter, I like using Hibari. It is a very simple and clean application, and I love the design philosophy behind it. I do wish it had a few extra features, like viewing someone’s profile in the app, or showing photographs similarly to the way the Twitter desktop app does it, but other than that I really like it.

My RSS feeds are all in NetNewsWire, synced to Google Reader. Checking my list I see that I’m subscribed to 26 carefully selected sites. This list is continually revised, and if I find one that is not holding my interest as well as I’d like, it gets dropped from the list.

I use DEVONthink as my anything bucket and outboard brain. I’ve gone back and forth between DEVONthink, Evernote, and Yojimbo, but find DEVONthink gives me the features that I want, without reliance on some amorphous cloud.

This is where things start to get a little geeky. I initially intended for this to be a single post, but as I write, it seems like it would be better to break it down into a series of smaller posts, each dedicated to a single app. Below is the list of apps that I use on a daily basis, and each has a story.

Downloads

• Hibari
• NetNewsWire
• DEVONthink
• Dropbox
• Quicksilver
• Caffeine
• Chrome
• MacVim
• Marked
• Moom
• OmniGraffle
• Read Later
• TextExpander
• The Hit List
• 1Password

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the king of productivity hacks for the Mac. Few applications can claim to have the impact on how a person uses their computer more than Quicksilver. At it’s most base form, Quicksilver is an application launcher, but it is also so much more than that. Setup however, takes a bit of work.

First, grab some plugins from Quicksilver’s preferences panel. The important ones, to me, are “User Interface Plugin”, “Clipboard Plugin”, “1Password Plugin”, and “Web Search Module”. You can see the full list that I currently use in the screenshot below.

Next, select the “Catalog” tab, then the “Quicksilver” item from the left view, and enable “Internal Commands”, “Internal Objects”, and “Proxy Objects”. These sources give Quicksilver some very interesting abilities. Click on the “Custom” item from the left view, and click the plus icon on the bottom and select “Web Search List”. In the drawer that opens on the right, click the plus icon and edit the “Name” field to be “ddg”, and the URL field to be:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=***

Now select the “Triggers” section of the preference pane, and click the plus icon on the bottom, then select “HotKey”, and in the field marked “Select an item” type “ddg”, and then tab to the next field and type “Search For”. Next, tab to the “Target” field, which will automatically be populated with text. We do not want this text in our trigger, so we will right click on this field and select “Remove”. Now click “Save”.

Double-click on the “HotKey” field to open up a drawer on the right hand side of the preferences window and assign your preferred hot key. I prefer Option-Space. Now, whenever I type my hotkey, Quicksilver opens with the third text panel open ready for me to type my DuckDuckGo search for whatever I’m looking for. When I hit return, Quicksilver opens Safari with my search results, and since I use DuckDuckGo, I use the vi keyboard commands to navigate the results, and Command-Return to open the selected results in a background tab.

Click the plus button at the bottom of the Triggers panel to create a new custom trigger. Type “Current Application”, then tab to the next panel and type “Show Menu Items” and click “Save”. Double-click the “HotKey” field again, and assign a new key combo to this trigger. I prefer Control-Space. This trigger gives us quick access to the menu items of whatever application has focus at the time. For example, I use it quite a bit in OmniGraffle to group items. Any application that makes heavy use of menu items (like Photoshop) is a great fit for this trigger.

Create another custom trigger, but this time type “Show Clipboard”. The default action should be “Run”, so save this command and assign it a key combo. I use Shift-Command-V. Make sure you are capturing your clipboard history in the Preferences tab.

It is worth spending some time in the preferences, actions, and triggers portions of Quicksilver’s configuration. There be gold in dem hills. I’ve covered what portions of Quicksilver I use, but it can do much, much more. Now that it is under rapid development again, I look forward to many more years of use.

MacVim

Tune in next time to focus on my favorite writing tool. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.

Major Charles Emerson Winchester III was a fictional character on one of my all time favorite shows, M*A*S*H. While he had many memorable scenes, the one that I remember best is the first episode he is introduced. Winchester was sent to the 4077th to assist while they were short handed, and he was not used to the incredibly hectic pace that the doctors needed to work at to save the lives of the wounded. The doctors tried to prod Winchester to move faster, but he responded with a line that’s been echoing in my mind lately.

I do one thing at a time, I do it very well, and then I move on.

You really don’t know how your workflow will stand up until you have more to do than you can handle. Since joining T8, I’ve felt a little like Winchester, but instead of keeping his resolve, I’ve felt my workflow crumble as I move into reactive mode. Instead of planning my work, and addressing one task at a time, doing it very well, and moving on, I’ve been responding to an increasingly complex influx of information. This does not put me in a position to do my best work.

Of course, this is no ones fault by my own, and a problem I intend to address immediately. A cursory glance at my work situation would indicate that I’m a perfect candidate for Getting Things Done. I’ve read the book, and I have a system which centers around The Hit List, but the system only works if you put everything in it. For example, I have tasks which require my attention that are entered into the shared task management/bug tracker system, and tasks assigned from the customer-facing ticketing system, and email, and phone calls, and face to face talks. My system started to break down as soon as I had more than one place to check for tasks. If I’m checking email, as well as the ticketing systems, as well as The Hit List, than requests for my time are not being appropriately prioritized. But, as they say, recognizing the problem is half the battle.

So, here is my plan of attack for the next week or so:

1. Check email at 7, 10, 1, and 4. If something is urgent and needs my attention immediately, it would come over my phone.
2. Check the ticketing systems immediately after email, pull anything needing my attention into The Hit List.
3. Prioritize, then break projects into their own lists
4. Assign a due date to each task.
5. Go to the top of the “Due Today” list, and get it done.

Step three above is easy to overlook, but is vitally important. I’m purposefully scheduling time to think. Thinking critically about my work is necessary. I not only need to prioritize each thought that appears in my inbox, I need to be able to discern what it is that each task is actually asking of me. I need this information before I can get to step five, which I call the “Winchester Imperative”: do one task at a time, do it very well, and then move on.

I will be using this new schedule starting tomorrow. If it works well, I should have more time, and more cognitive resources available, to post an update to how it is going.

CocoaHeads changed my life. This afternoon I am killing time in a coffee shop, about to head to work for an appointment with HR. When I get there, I’ll turn in my badge, they will wish me luck, and I’ll walk out the door. Monday, I start a new chapter in my life with T8 Webware. To say that I’m a little nervous about this change would be an understatement. I’ve spent time with these guys, they are smart, ambitious, and I believe in what they are doing. I’m going to be part of building something awesome, and I’m extremely excited.

I met the guys from T8 at CocoaHeads months ago. We got to talking, and found that we had mutual interests. We met for lunch, I visited their main office (which is beautiful, by the way), we had lunch again, we talked and talked, and they made me an offer. My life is changing because I took the time to learn something new, and to reach out to others who shared the my interests. Go2 will never make me independently wealthy, but it did open up new doors and bring me to meet people and have experiences I would have missed out on otherwise.

I haven’t been to a CocoaHeads meeting lately. Between raising my family and finishing my masters degree, I haven’t had the time. Now that things are falling back into place, I think I owe them a visit.

Disclaimer: If you do not have your recovery key, or if you have lost your passphrase, this post will not help you. Sorry.

So, just for kicks, say you did not backup your Mac for a couple of weeks. Further, let’s say that, being shrewd about security, you turned on full disk encryption on your Mac. This was me, Wednesday, deciding to upgrade to OS X 10.7.2, knowing full well that I had skipped the last weekends scheduled SuperDuper! backup. Foolish and foolhearty, I know. I found out exactly how foolish it was when my precious MacBook Pro began to exhibit progressively stranger behavior as the day went on. Thursday morning, it would not boot at all, and would power off after unlocking the FileVault encrypted drive.

So, no problem, I have a clone, which, true, is a couple weeks old, but I thought I could just boot off of that and copy the newer data off my failed OS X install. A plan which would have worked perfectly if I had not encrypted the drive. I could see my internal disk when booted off the clone drive, but I could find no way to unlock the disk to get to the data. Disk Utility showed the internal drive as being present and fine, but the one partition on it was marked as “unknown”, since it was not unlocked at boot time.

Luckily, Disk Utility has a command line version called diskutil, with more options and fine grained control. However, the command that I needed called for knowing the UUID of the disk, which I did not have. The command diskutil ca list will show you the UUID, sometimes, but I could not see the UUID of the logical volume of the disk I needed, I could only see the UUID of the physical volume (Incidentally, for more information on the new volume manager, check out the Ars Technica Lion review covering Core Storage here.) I’m not sure what the rules are governing how and why diskutil will show the UUID, but I could not see the internal drive’s UUID when booted from the clone. Without the UUID, I could not get to my data.

So, I booted off the Lion recovery partition by holding down ⌘ R after pressing the power button. After booting up, I opened the Terminal and typed diskutil cs list. Now we were getting somewhere.

Logical Volume B15D4021-F519-4F7B-9B78-D4001361BA32 B15D4021-F519-4F7B-9B44444001361BA32

The recovery partition was able to see the logical volume, but it was locked. To unlock the volume, I entered this command:

diskutil cs unlockVolume B15D4021-F519-4F7B-9B78-D4001361BA32 -stdinpassphrase

The diskutil command prompted me for my passphrase, unlocked the disk, and mounted it under /Volumes. The next trick was actually getting the data off the disk and onto my external disk. The recovery environment is very bare bones, there was no intention of using it as a file manager. The easiest thing to do was to rsync my home directory over to my clone disk. Since rsync is not available in the recovery manager, I used the version from my cloned disk, so the command looked something like this:

/Volumes/Flux/usr/bin/rsync -avz /Volumes/Prime/Users/Me/ /Volumes/Flux/Users/Me

Where Flux is the name of my clone, and Prime is the name of my internal drive.

This effectively cloned only my home directory, saving the source code, college papers, photographs, and everything else I’ve collected in the two weeks since the last backup. Next, I booted off of my clone drive again, verified that my important stuff was there, including a few pictures I took yesterday morning, and used Disk Utility to wipe my internal drive. Finally, I started SuperDuper! on the clone, and tried to copy the good image back to the internal disk.

Just then the internal drive failed. My problem was not with the 10.7.2 update, it was with the spinning rust inside my Mac. It seems I retrieved the data off of the internal drive just in time.

Most release notes are so dull. A cut and paste list of code changes, new features, and fixed bugs. Go2 version 1.3 certainly contains it’s share of fixes and enhancements, but this is Farmdog, so Go2’s release notes are more of a story.

1.3 began development shortly after 1.2 was released. 1.2 was solid, so I thought I’d turn my attention to the user interface, and add a feature that I’ve been wanting for a long time, the ability to organize my bookmarks with smart folders. However, The existing interface of Go2 was going to need a major overhaul for smart folders to make any sense, so I went to work refining and expanding the main window. It would be wrong not to mention that I’ve drawn inspiration from both Twitter and Sparrow, not to mention LittleSnapper.

Along the way I found a few annoying bugs that were present in 1.2 that I’ve now fixed in 1.3. For example, the “Add Bookmark” and “Edit Bookmark” dialogs are now using the same panel, where before they used two different panels. Little things like that led to duplication of code, which invariably leads to mistakes. I also experimented with ideas, some of which led to some great improvements. One of which was a new bookmark wizard. The wizard was, in my opinion, very nice. It walked you through creating a bookmark one step at a time, asking first for the protocol scheme, then the host, and then the path, and optionally a username and password combination. It was all nicely animated, and I loved it.

Then, someone who knows far better than I said “When you think to your self, ‘I should make a wizard’, slap yourself and then dont”. He was right, Go2 is a professional’s tool, professionals that I’m marketing to don’t need a wizard, they need speed and tools that don’t make them think. So, I took his advice and instead added the ability for Go2 to pre-populate the new bookmark field if it finds a URL in your clipboard. So, if you copy a URL from someone else, switch to Go2 and hit Command-N, the URL you just copied will be there. It works great, and its a feature that Go2 would not have had if it were not for the wizard.

Next were the smart folders, and the outline view that they live in. I used an open source project to build the outline view, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. However, it did take a lot of work and several versions before it finally turned out right. I won’t get into all the details here, but the smart folders almost drove me nuts.

Another feature that was far more difficult than it should have been was the center information button. The function of the button was not hard, but I spent weeks getting the look of it just right. I finally was able to use an icon that one of my awesome beta testers created for me, and it couldn’t be more perfect. I probably went through fifteen iterations of that button.

Come to think of it, the addition of buttons has been something that I have tried to avoid at all costs. I really hope I’ve hit just the right balance of usability and aesthetic appeal.

Towards what I was thinking should have been the end of the beta cycle, I simply became overloaded with things to do. I talk about it at length in my article The Experiment, but in June Farmdog went on hiatus until I finish my Masters degree at Iowa State. I put away the code, and focused on my family, my day job, and my classwork, and took a break from development for a few months. I miss developing on a regular basis, but this is a necessity. Last month, I learned that Apple was going to require all App Store applications to be sandboxed. I had some time, I knew Go2 1.3 was nearly complete, so I once again dug out Xcode and decided to ship 1.3.

I knew from before that Go2 ran fine on 10.7, but what I did not expect was that my reliance on one third party tool, ShortcutRecorder, was going to cause me so much pain. Xcode 4 does not allow Interface Builder plugins, so I spent several days getting all the right pieces in all the right places so Go2 would compile cleanly. Lesson learned, no more frameworks, it’s write it myself or it doesn’t ship. The next version of Go2 will not have ShortcutRecorder.

Despite the initial problems with compiling Go2 on Lion, Go2 is now updated, clean, and runs great. I’ve fixed the bugs that were preventing me from shipping it earlier. I’ve been using it at home and at work for months now, and I’m happy to ship it. Go2 is sandboxed, so its data now lives in ~/Library/Containers/com.farmdog.go2/data. If you want to integrate Go2 with Quicksilver (which is what I do), export the bookmarks for Spotlight indexing, and have Quicksilver index ~/Library/Containers/com.farmdog.go2/Data/Documents/Go2Data. Works like a charm.

I do not expect any problems with the new release, but if you see any, please let me know and I’ll be happy to do my best to make it right. I am still in school for another three semesters, and Farmdog is still officially on hiatus, but I’ll be adding small fixes here and there to Go2 as I have time.

The final lesson I’ve learned from 1.3 is to stop making major changes in minor point releases. 1.3 will be the last such release, point releases beginning with 1.4 will be very minor changes, with any new features or major modifications being worked into version 2.0.

I hope you enjoy Go2 version 1.3, and I truly hope it makes your day just a little bit easier.

Thank you.

Others have already said so much about Steve Jobs stepping down as the CEO of Apple that I had serious doubts about adding my voice to the existing cacophony. Others have written so much, and surely so much more will be over the next few days. I had doubts, but I have this to say:

Apple is a reflection of Steve Jobs, a reflection of his aesthetic taste, his preference for design, and his uncompromising demand for quality in everything bearing the Apple logo. This dedication to creating the best polarized the tech community into a group of a few who understood his passion, and a much larger group of detractors who love to point out each and every misstep Apple has taken. Steve Jobs is the best because he would accept nothing less. Not from himself, not from those he worked with, and not from the products his company created.

This is good.

To be uncompromising today means going against the tide, it means pushing boulders up hill. It means ignoring everyone else who says that what you are trying to do is impossible, that you ask too much, that you should simply not care. American industry outside of Apple seems perfectly content to punch a clock, make a paycheck, and watch the hours drone by till the weekend comes and they can drown their atrophied ambitions in alcohol. That is not my job. No skin off my back. Two tears in a bucket.

Mac OS X drew me to Apple because of its Unix core. Since then, I have studied psychology, design, typography, and am now earning a masters degree in the Human Computer Interaction. I do not think it hyperbole to say that Apple, in a way, affected my life. More than anything, what I have learned from watching Apple for the past decade is that not only is it OK to strive for excellence, it is in this striving that you find success.

Half-ass is not good enough.

Those who do not care will always surround you, those who will try to belittle you and find fault in anything you do. Do not let them drag you down. Stand out, believe, care, and bring a Mac to work.

So, thank you Steve. Thank you for making your life a story that we can look up to. Thank you for creating, building, failing, believing, and succeeding.

Every so often I get the inkling to make this site more than what it is. Since 2008 I’ve been writing fairly regularly here about whatever comes to mind, and in doing so I’ve covered several topics. I’ve written about Android and Mac geekery, success and failure in Mac development, business, psychology, systems administration, personal stories, and memories. More than anything, I have tried to inspire others, and sometimes, if I’m very, very lucky, I succeed.

From time to time something I’ve written gets linked to by someone unexpected, and sometimes I get linked to because I’ve emailed someone to show them the site. These spikes in readers tells me that what I write can be interesting, at least part of the time, but the pattern is haphazard. Probably as haphazard and random as the topics I’ve covered. I think that this range of topics is what discourages readers from returning to jonathanbuys.com, at least outside of those that know me personally.

For a long time, I simply did not care how many people read the site. I did not collect statistics or hit counts, and the only metric I had for measuring the popularity (or lack thereof) of the site was email and Twitter responses. Lately though I’ve been wondering why I keep the site at all, if not for people to read it. Part of me wants to answer that the easy way and say that it is simply a developers journal, a place to rant about whatever my latest complaint is about this language or that syntax. That’s not the truth though. If it were, the main topic of the site would be development, and it is clearly not. Another reason is to maintain a sort of “online resume” for potential job offers. Keeping an online persona for employers is an interesting idea, and I would certainly not be against anyone looking through the site to try to get to know me better, but as a sole purpose I think the online resume could be done better in a different format. A much older reason I had for keeping the site was just to practice writing. An idea worth exploring.

To be able to write coherently, you must first be able to organize your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. In the 37 Signals book “Getting Real”, the authors say to hire the better writer, because good writing is the sign of an organized mind. Writing is exercise for the mind. If watching TV is eating potato chips, writing is lifting weights. However, writing for practice does not mean that you have to share. If practicing writing was my only motivation, I would have no need for a website. A personal journal would do. So, why do I keep publishing? Why do I keep working on the site?

Mostly, its hope. I will be deep, bare-bones honest with you here. It is hope that maybe, just maybe, the site will turn into something more, or lead to something more. I publish here because I hope that something I love to do, writing, can lead to opportunities I cannot foresee. I write here for the same reasons I started Farmdog, the same reasons I went back to grad school… hope. Still, hope and $2.02 will get you a medium cup of coffee at Smokey Row. It is not enough to hope. To make anything real you must take action. To take action, you need direction, to have direction, you must have a plan. Me, I’m a planner.

Going back to the idea of writing being the sign of an organized mind, I honestly did not know how this article was going to end until I started writing it. In the writing, my mind worked through the reasoning and logic, aligning things I knew into a cohesive story. A story that starts being more focused on the topics I write about, and thinking more about the reader than myself. I don’t know how I’m going to say I’m writing to be a writer without sounding like an asshole, but I’m going to do my best.

The Motorola ATRIX 4G is technology released before its time. At first glance, it seems like any other Android phone with impressive technical specs and questionable user interface decisions, but the phone as a phone is not the interesting part of this device.

The phone can be docked to what appears to be a notebook, and used as an (almost) full-fledged computer. Motorola (soon to be Google?) calls this a “webtop application”, and packages a version of Firefox. I would call this technology an early preview of whats to come.

The iPhone changed the mobile phone market. It proved how much a small mobile device could do. Before the iPhone mobile applications were horrible, slow, and expensive. I remember it costing $2.99 per month to play Pac-Man. The disruption caused by the iPhone is still being felt as the market continues to adjust, and innovation continues to leap forward. As the phones become more powerful and more capable, the role of the desktop computer will continue to decrease. Eventually, the big boxes will only be useful to developers and movie makers. The role that they played will be replaced by our phones.

On my desk, as on many others, sits my MacBook Pro (clamshell mode, in a BookArc, if you were interested), a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and my iPhone in a dock. How long will it be until the MacBook is no longer needed? How long until all I need is to drop the phone in the dock, my monitor springs to life, and I start working the same as I always have?

As a short sidebar, touch based interfaces are wonderful, but I believe that there will be a place for the tactile response of a physical keyboard for a long time to come.

A brief look at the history of computers shows a steadily declining physical size, and a steadily increasing amount of power. I do not believe that this trend shows any sign of slowing. For example, recent research by IBM shows great promise in increasing the amount of, and reliability of, local flash storage. How long will it be until both the raw computational power and local storage in a phone both match what is available in a notebook computer?

The form factor of a notebook computer is a good trade off. There is ample screen resolution, and a full sized keyboard for serious work, and it is portable enough so you can comfortably sit on your couch to get things done. However, it does not pass the pocket test. That is, you can’t fit one in your pocket… unless you have freakishly large pockets. But, what about a notebook sized device with a keyboard, monitor, and touchpad that you could slide your phone into like you load a CD now? What if you could take that same phone and dock it on your desk to use as your main desktop computer. What if you could bring it with you anywhere, and have everything with you, anywhere you had a pocket?

The ATRIX is clearly a step in that direction, but it is too little, too soon. The ATRIX is more of a curiosity than a real consumer device that people would be expected to use on a daily basis. I explored one at a local BestBuy for a while, and found the user interface to be laggy, slow to respond to mouse events. It felt like using old emulation software. I can not imagine why anyone would choose to use the device as it is, the hardware is simply not ready. However, slow hardware is a temporary problem. The ATRIX is a glimpse of the future.

My daughter had an ear infection. A common occurrence in children, so I brought her down to our local doctors office. The doctor took one look at her ear and knew what needed to be done. He wrote out a prescription, gave me a few instructions, and sent me on my way. I then had two choices, I could drive the twenty miles into the city to get her prescription filled by Walgreens, or I could drive seven miles over to the next town to see if the local pharmacy could take care of it. I decided on the shorter trip.

Walking into the pharmacy in the next town I felt a bit like McFly in Back to the Future. The front of the store is segregated by a few short isles of various ointments and creams, heartburn treatment and special insoles for shoes. Towards the center of the store is a small cafe serving soda and malts. The pharmacy is at the back of the store, adorned by relics of its past: an antique cash register, mortar and pestle, weights and scales, and an assortment of glass bottles that once contained the popular medicines of their times.

I walked to the counter and asked the teenager if they could fill the prescription. She looked at the slip and the doctor’s scrawl, asked if I had been there before, and went to ask the advice of the woman in the back. She soon returned and said that it would be just a few moments, and that the other woman was working on the prescription now. I walked around the shop a bit longer, taking note of the blood pressure testing machine and the variety of bandages on the shelf, and was soon called to the counter by the woman who had prepared the medicine.

After I paid the copay, I told her how glad I was that the little pharmacy was there. She smiled, said thank you, and then did something unexpected. She said, that since I have children, and that children sometimes got sick in the middle of the night, that she would give me both her home phone and her cell phone numbers on the back of her business card.

The woman was both the pharmacist and the owner of the little corner store, and the great-granddaughter of the man who opened the store over one hundred years ago. On the drive home I reflected on the choice I had made to visit the small town instead of the city, and it occurred to me what a difference in quality of service there was. Not only was the smaller store closer, I came away with more than expected. I could have easily lost two hours driving to the city, and had little to no interaction with the people mixing the medicine. The transaction could have been dry and remote, but was instead warm and personal. It felt good to know who I was dealing with, that they had a concern for the welfare of my children, and that I was supporting the local community.

Chain stores have increasingly replaced the small town, family owned store, and that is a shame. People stand to gain so much more by shopping locally. I now have the pharmacists home and cell numbers on our family bulletin board at home, and an assurance that I could call anytime, day or night. The personal touch she added to our business today is the essence of personal quality.

The venerable BBEdit recently received a big upgrade, and looks poised to attract users of TextMate, which, by all accounts, has been abandoned by its developer. I tried to love BBEdit, but it always felt like trying on someone else’s clothes. They might look good, but that does not mean the clothes will be comfortable for you. Recent conversations about text editors on Build and Analyze led me to rethink my position, and examine in more detail how I came to choose MacVim.

Several years ago, I was sitting with a contractor as he installed a new firewall on our network. He was explaining to me how Unix systems relied on text files, and how all Unix systems came with a text editor named vi. I asked, in my ignorance, why anyone should bother using such ancient technology, when a modern graphical text editor was available. Pragmatically, he replied that someday I would be connected to a server through SSH or telnet and the only way to edit a file would be with vi. I took his advice to heart, and I am glad I did.

Over the years as I have dug deeper and deeper into Unix (and later Linux) systems, I accumulated a few of my favorite vi tricks which I kept in an exrc file. I had complicated macros that would do things like building the skeleton of a shell script, or insert a comment with my name and email address, or the current date. OK, maybe it was not that complicated, but every time I hit the mapped key combo, I smiled. I learned to navigate to an exact line in a file, to yank and paste text, and generally how to get along with the only text editor I could be sure was on each and every server I was responsible for. I did not realize it at the time, but I was building up valuable expertise, and, it seems, more importantly, a type of muscle memory.

In the past, I always kept my work on the servers separate from my “work” I did on my Mac. My Mac was a hobby, but work was important. When TextMate appeared, I downloaded a copy to use for building web sites. I enjoyed TextMate, but there was never love. Love takes time, frustration, and understanding. Love was what I was building at work with vi. I simply did not understand it at the time.

In fact, for many years I kept the attitude that vi was not a modern text editor. It was simply a tool for work and that on a Mac I should be able to use a graphical text editor that did lots of fancy tricks. It was not until this summer, after years of building my vi knowledge on the server that I decided to use vi for a Python programming course on my Mac. I downloaded a copy of MacVim, spent a few days configuring it the way I liked it, and, for what feels like the first time, felt completely comfortable in my text editor.

I had already overcome the biggest obstacle to vi: the learning curve. Slowly, over years of use, I had become fluent in one of the most powerful text editors available.

I will not go into the details of how to configure MacVim, there are several articles for that already. If you are interested, I keep my MacVim configuration in GitHub. What I will say is that taking the time to learn the basics of vi, and taking a few days, maybe a week, to find the magic combination of plugins and configurations that work for you, is worth the effort. MacVim is like a gateway drug. Once you get used to using it, you might find yourself attempting to navigate a new email in Mail with vi key bindings.

I am still learning new things with MacVim. There are precious few tricks that another editor can do that MacVim cannot. However, choosing MacVim is akin to choosing a partner to share your life. The more you put into the relationship, the more you get out of it. In any relationship, over time you become aware of the others shortcomings, but if the relationship is healthy, those shortcomings are very easy to overlook. If you spend serious time in text, it behooves you to spend serious time learning your tools.

MacVim is actively developed, has a dedicated community, is easily extendible, and can fly through the biggest text files with ease. However, it does take time to understand, and I will not try to tell you that the commands you use to control MacVim are intuitive or “easy”. Nothing worth doing is ever easy.