The Keyboard Maestro giveaway has ended, and I have a winner to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Jonno Cohen jonno@jonnocohen.com You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorr … | Continue reading
Today I’m releasing an initial version of my latest tool, CurlyQ. It’s a work in progress, though should be immediately useful to those who need it. I need your input on where it goes next, what’s missing, and what you’d like to do with it that it can’t handle yet. Join me in the … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a license ($36 value) for Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro is an insanely powerful app for automation on your Mac that no power user should be without. It can automate literally everything. Power users will love it, but everyday users can … | Continue reading
The App Tamer giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Delaine Taylor Kevin Cline You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but App Ta … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 licenses ($14.95 value each) for App Tamer. Got unruly applications? App Tamer helps you take control of your CPU by controlling how much access your apps have to it. Throttle apps that take up too much CPU, speeding up the apps you’re us … | Continue reading
Another silly little rabbit hole I’ve gone down… The Lyrics plugin for SearchLink can now embed the JavaScript version of lyrics from Genius.com, complete with annotations. The query is !lyricjs SEARCH STRING. Running !lyricjs Blood in the Cut K.flay will output this: Read K.Fla … | Continue reading
The Curio giveaway has ended, and I have a winner to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Alan Mahon You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but Curio is still worth check … | Continue reading
I hope you’ve had nice holidays! I’ve updated my Bitlyize service to work with v4 of the Bit.ly API. It parses the input for all URLs and replaces them with shortened links connected to your account. Not only can this make long links more readable, it gives you some analytics on … | Continue reading
It’s unseasonably warm for Christmas here in Minnesota. It’s 50° out. To mark the weird occasion, I created a quick plugin for SearchLink that lets you run a search like: !current 55987 And get: Weather for Winona, Minnesota on 2023-12-25 at 12:53 PM: 51.8 and Light rain The pl … | Continue reading
Merry Christmas! I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a Pro license ($119 value) for Curio. Curio is the perfect app for managing your brainstorms, your research, your projects, and your digital life. A Curio “space” is a blank canvas on which you can add notes, web pages, pdf … | Continue reading
I do most of my automation and string manipulation scripting using Ruby. I know it’s not the most popular language these days, but it’s the one I know the best (thanks to my days of hacking on TextMate bundles) and it’s usually the fastest way for me to solve a problem. I have re … | Continue reading
The Kaleidoscope giveaway has ended, and I have a winner to announce! The winners! Congratulations to Ken Bavier! You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but Kaleidoscope is still … | Continue reading
Ok, this one will probably wrap up this little run of key binding tricks. It’s been fun, though, and I’d love to answer any questions I can in the forum. If you’ve ever examined my master DefaultKeyBinding.dict (or even looked at the readme), you’ll see that I make use of a lot o … | Continue reading
I guess it’s keybinding week this week. I’ve talked about the kill ring and repeat binding, but I’ve been digging in and revamping my own DefaultKeyBinding.dict file, so I keep wanting to share some of the cooler things it can do because I know the file in the project is pretty m … | Continue reading
Thanks to HoudahSpot for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve been using it for years and swear by it as a way to find files that Spotlight can’t, quickly and easily. HoudahSpot is a powerful tool for finding and ma … | Continue reading
Another trick for readers interested in honing their keyboard-fu on macOS. In Vim, most operations have can have a count specified in the keystrokes for the command, e.g. 3dd to delete 3 lines. You can do similar in any Cocoa text field (all Apple apps, plus most native apps). Yo … | Continue reading
So you may have seen my KeyBindings project before. It’s an insanely large collection of keybinding tricks that work in any macOS text field. Well, any native cocoa field. You won’t have much luck in Electron or other non-native text editors. But for most uses, including in Safar … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a 1-year subscription ($96 value) for Kaleidoscope. There is no better program for diffing on macOS. From code to prose to images, see what changed with fine granularity. Plus great new Git integration! From the developer: Spot the differ … | Continue reading
This post will only be of interest to people writing scripts in Ruby. Seriously, zero utility if you’re not using Ruby. Though I would be curious how you accomplish the same thing in other languages like Rust and Python, because I’ve never gotten too deep with string manipulation … | Continue reading
The SpamSieve giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Garrett Coakley Daniel Matz You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but SpamS … | Continue reading
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! This tip is pretty ingenious, if I do say so myself. You might know all the ways that TextExpander can save you time, but did you also know that TextExpande … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with MindMeister, the best collaborative mind mapping software out there. Do You Use It? Finder Tags See Focused Use I haven’t written about tagging for a long time because I felt like, at this point, I’ve convinced everyone who cou … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 licenses ($39.99 value each) for SpamSieve. SpamSieve provides powerful spam filtering for any email setup. It learns and adapts to your mail, so it’s able to block nearly all spam. Use it instead of or in addition to your current junk ma … | Continue reading
I decided to make a “Brett’s Favorites 2023” part 2. I missed a few things in the first list. This will be a shorter post, but should cover some gaps I left in the first one. Apps I Missed Timing I use Timing every day for keeping track of how I spend my time on my computer (a … | Continue reading
The Soulver giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Knut Focke Chris Metze René Quesnel Vihang Khare You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t … | Continue reading
Welcome to my yearly post about stuff I’ve loved in the last year. I love doing this because it reminds me how amazing the Mac/iOS app ecosystem is these days. I can’t list every app I use in this post, it would take forever, but I can highlight some of the outstanding ones. I’m … | Continue reading
Thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve been a user for years and it’s saved my hide many times. It’s so easy to set up, and just as importantly, easy to restore files whenever needed. Everybody should have a good cloud backup, and Backblaze is the be … | Continue reading
Well, the SaneBox drawing has happened I have winners to announce! The following readers have won a 1-year subscription to the handiest email service out there! Andreas Lauritzen Dániel Krausz Jamie Peloquin Esteban Umerez Greg Johnson Congrats to the winners! If you didn’ … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 4 licenses ($34.95 value each) for Soulver. Ever wish you could type out a math problem in words and have the answers handed to you? Soulver combines a notepad with a calculator and gives you instant answers. From the developer: Soulver i … | Continue reading
The Tower giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Suzuki Airi Gavin Jerman You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but Tower is sti … | Continue reading
I just pushed v2.1.6 of mdless. Once all these 2.0 changes are confirmed to be stable, I’ll let this project go for a while, but right now there’s lots to improve on and I’m enjoying it as a way to blow off steam. The biggest change in 2.1.6 is the ability to use hex codes when t … | Continue reading
Thanks to SaneBox for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! Instead of a monthly sponsored post this month, the good folks at SaneBox have decided to join my giveaway series and offer 5 free 1-year subscriptions to SaneBox to BrettTerpstra.com readers. Just sign up below for a … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 1-year licenses ($99 value each) for Tower. Tower is the absolute best Git GUI out there. If you use Git for work or personal projects, its in-depth integration with the entire Git toolset makes life easier, even if you’re already well-ve … | Continue reading
I made a few major updates to mdless 2.0 (first announced a couple days ago) over the holiday weekend. Note that you can make all of the new options permanent in the config file (see Easily Update Config). Options specified on the command line will always override anything in the … | Continue reading
The Default Folder X giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Alexander Allori Michael X You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but … | Continue reading
I’ve updated mdless to 2.0. Well, 2.0.5 at this point. It’s a complete overhaul of the command line Markdown parser/viewer. It’s been a pretty popular project, and is being used on all kinds of OSs, but it got frustrating as the whole thing was based on regular expressions for pa … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 licenses ($39.95 value each) for Default Folder X. Default Folder X is an amazing extension for your open and save dialogs on macOS. It makes navigating folders easier, tagging better, and implements flexible favorites and allows specific … | Continue reading
The Noteplan giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Erik Wessel-Berg David Blue Brandon Ballentine Carley Knight Paolo Sturbini You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But … | Continue reading
Thanks to kaleidoscope nov for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! Review versions of text and image files—and even folders full of files—with the world’s most powerful file comparison app. Kaleidoscope gives you powerf … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 1-year subscriptions ($99 value each) for Noteplan. If you love plain text (and Markdown), you’re going to love Noteplan for organizing all your notes and todos. Using plain text, you can create daily logs, digital bullet journals, track … | Continue reading
The Hazel giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Bruno Martinelli Mike Simeon Attaway Federico Will You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t … | Continue reading
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! Ever wanted to get into scripted snippets but didn’t know where to start? Read on. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know about the … | Continue reading
I’ve had it out there for a while, but I thought I’d point out that I’ve ported my universal “help” command to Fish. halp removes the hassle of figuring out whether a command’s help comes from man CMD, help CMD, CMD -h, or type CMD. Just run halp CMD (where CMD is the command you … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 licenses ($42 value each) for Hazel. Hazel lets you create automations based on changes to files, allowing you to do things like automatically filing PDFs, sorting downloads, running optimizations on new images, or just about any file ope … | Continue reading
So it turns out Google now offers an API (once again). It’s limited to 100 searches per day for the free version, so I don’t want to put my API key into the public distribution of SearchLink, but if you want to tap into Google’s power for your searches, you can now add your own A … | Continue reading
The WordCounter giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Chris Nick Taylor Carley E Knight You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, … | Continue reading
Thanks to Tower for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I swear by this app, and anyone who uses Git for any part of their work or play should check it out. Tower’s mission is simple: to make Git easy and enjoyable for … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Backblaze. Back up everything. CloudPrompter The idea of a teleprompter is simple, yet so many people screw it up. Teleprompter Premium is my favorite on iOS/Mac, and the same devs have just released a web version of the same. … | Continue reading