First, I’ve created a repo for SearchLink plugins. This is mostly going to be example code, but you might find some useful ones in there. If you’ve never checked out SearchLink and do any kind of writing that requires linking to web sites/pages, app landing pages, Gist embeds, or … | Continue reading
SearchLink 2.3.50 is out and contains fixes for some recent changes in DuckDuckGo’s responses. It currently passes all tests except for one (TMDB is returning a movie for the search result “Brad Pitt”, rather than the actor page, and when I add “actor” to the search it dumps out … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 licenses ($19.99 value each) for WordCounter. Just in time for NaNoWriMo, WordCounter is an app for writers who want to track the most important metric in their daily goal: how many words you write and where. It records your writing produ … | Continue reading
The Scrivener giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Philip Zastrow David Lynch paul kesselma 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, so … | Continue reading
Thanks to Sanebox for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! I don’t know what I’d do without it! Envision your email as a bustling conference hall, filled with diverse attendees. Professional correspondences, casual … | Continue reading
I’ve created a forum for discussing all things nerdy, the BrettTerpstra.com Forum. I wanted a place to have conversations about my various projects, but also to allow more interaction with my readers. I’ll be active on it, and I hope you will too. Right now every one of my projec … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 licenses ($59 value each) for Scrivener. Scrivener is the ultimate app for writers. Organize your story, add research, and get to writing with full support for notes, links, footnotes, rich text, Markdown and so much more. With story orga … | Continue reading
A long time ago I published a tool called iTunesIcon that would grab an app icon from iTunes. It worked well in its time, but has been mostly broken in recent years. It was designed mostly for writers who were reviewing apps and needed to get an app’s icon for artwork, but could … | Continue reading
The TextExpander giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Adam Pócs Sungbin Jo Chris Finazzo 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
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 1-year subscriptions ($39.96 value each) for TextExpander. TextExpander is a long-time supporter of BrettTerpstra.com and I’m very proud of that. It’s the first app I install on a new Mac and I almost can’t function without it. It saves m … | Continue reading
You may have noticed I’m running a series of giveaways on this blog. Literally every developer I’ve reached out to has been willing to put up 1-10 licenses or 1-year subscriptions for their app, and I’m extremely pleased with the list I’ve put together. In an effort to keep track … | Continue reading
The Hookmark giveaway has ended, and I have a winner to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Marcus Phelan You should have received an email and the developer will be in touch, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, bu … | Continue reading
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! When it comes to focusing my attention, nothing helps avoid mundane distractions better than not having to repeat myself in emails, type out common urls, or fix my most common misspellings. TextExpander brin … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a Pro license ($69.99 value) for Hookmark. Hookmark is the ultimate tool for keeping track of all of your stuff. Your links, your notes, your documents, your tasks… Hookmark makes everything linkable and provides easy navigation between rel … | Continue reading
Recent releases of Marked have fixed Bear compatibility on Sonoma. As part of this, I’ve updated the Bear style for Marked, and written a little custom preprocessor to handle Bear’s (CommonMark) syntax properly. If you want a Marked preview styled to look exactly like Bear (with … | Continue reading
The Timing giveaway has ended, and I have a winner to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Scott Willsey You should have received an email and the developer will be in touch, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but … | Continue reading
Just a quick note to let you know that there are new versions of Marked and Bunch Beta with some fixes for Sonoma. The Marked update is live for direct customers, and in review for Setapp and Mac App Store customers. Watch for updates on your channel. It fixes an issue that preve … | Continue reading
Thanks to Dropzone for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve been a Dropzone fan for many years now, and use it daily for everything from processing images to sharing files via my S3 account. Dropzone brings everyday … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a 1-year subscription ($108 value) for Timing. I use Timing daily and it’s helped me automatically track time that I would never have had the discipline to manage on my own. Billable hours, time I spend on personal projects, time I spend ga … | Continue reading
I pushed a couple updates to Journal, my command line journaling tool today. As a reminder, you can add a natural language argument to your journal command which will set the date of the entry, e.g. journal mood "yesterday 8pm". This allows you to create entries in post with hist … | Continue reading
The Winners The CleanShot X giveaway has ended, and I have three winners to announce! Congratulations to: Scott Rychnowski Darren Everden David Brown Each winner should have received an email with a redeem link/code, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I Didn … | Continue reading
Thanks to Sanebox for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! I just trained 3 new senders into custom Sanebox folders today (just by moving an email from them once) and will never have to see them in my Inbox again, and will be able to easily locate them when I do want to … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with MindMeister, the best collaborative mind mapping software out there. Toolbox Pro, Logger for Shortcuts, and Nautomate Snailed It, run by my friend Rosemary Orchard, has taken custody of several apps developed by Alex Hay after … | Continue reading
I’m super excited about this one, as I consider CleanShot X to be one of the best Mac apps developed in the last few years. Hands down the best screenshot/recording app, but also just a highly elegant app all around. Note t … | Continue reading
The Winners The Tap Forms giveaway has ended, and I have two winners to announce! Congratulations to: Jonathan Laniado Doug Lionetti (I swear the giveaway robot has no preference for last names starting with L. It’s purely chance.) Each winner should have received an email wi … | Continue reading
In case you missed it, I recently released Journal, a CLI for keeping a journal with structured data that can be queried and analyzed. An update is live with a couple of nifty new features. First, instead of just a type of weather for a question (which inserts the current conditi … | Continue reading
I’m starting up giveaways again on BrettTerpstra.com, and I’m exited to kick it off with 2 free licenses for Tap Forms for Mac. It’s an amazing database product that lets you organize and access your data on any device. It’s available on Mac, iPhone, iPad and even Apple Watch. Th … | Continue reading
So, a long time ago I wrote this Jekyll plugin that does countdowns and I don’t think I ever really used it. You just give it an end date and it inserts a countdown into the post. But I needed something to count down to, so I’m running a 40% off Marked sale using the coupon COOLP … | Continue reading
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I can’t count the number of hours I save using TextExpander. Oh wait, I can, because they email you a report every week to let you know… So you think you kn … | Continue reading
I’ve made some changes to Journal (I didn’t mess with the data format this time) that add some functionality and will maybe help with integrating with some apps like Obisidian. First, you can now define a date type. Date entries will be parsed from natural language into date obje … | Continue reading
I’ve put some more time into both Journal and na. The latest version of na represents quite a few hours of tinkering. See the na project page for full details. In case you’ve missed in previously, na is my command line tool for reading and modifying TaskPaper files in your projec … | Continue reading
Thanks to Timing for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve loved Timing for years, and the new vertical timeline view is an awesome upgrade to one of my most-used apps. Time is your most precious resource. You need t … | Continue reading
Just a couple quick updates to the Journal CLI I published yesterday that I wanted everyone who was trying it out to know about before they have too much data in it. First, if keys were nested using dot syntax, e.g. health.rating and health.sleep, it would create a hash like: { … | Continue reading
I recently started couple’s therapy to try and improve the often-complicated relationship between myself (ADHD, bipolar) and my partner (autistic) and all of the unique problems that combination of neurodivergence presents. As part of this, I was asked to keep a journal containin … | Continue reading
I went on a trip to Minneapolis this weekend. It went really well; I saw some great friends, ate some great food, and spent some early mornings coding at the hotel. I was just coding to kill time when I couldn’t sleep, and playing with na seemed like the perfect way to do it. The … | Continue reading
Thanks to SaneBox for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! I rely on my SaneBox Digest to get an overview of all the emails that (thankfully) skipped my inbox without having to wade through them all. Highly recommend! … | Continue reading
I’ve updated na with some new stuff I thought I’d share. First off, I wanted an easy way to archive all @done actions in one swoop without having to use a lot of flags and switches to locate them and move them. So I added an archive command, which takes a search string as an argu … | Continue reading
I love RegExRX for testing regular expressions. It has all the features I could want from such an app, including the ability to copy a working regex out prepared for a range of languages. It’s what I’ve stuck with for years. As I experiment with my regexes, I’ll save them in RegE … | Continue reading
Thanks to Kaleidoscope for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! The addition of Git History diffing is excellent, and I’m excited to share it with everybody. Review versions of text and image files — and even folde … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanMyMac X, all the tools to speed up your Mac, in one app. zmd: Access Handy Utilities and Services in CLI zmd (zmd.ee) is an experiment by Mighil. It hosts a bunch of handy ulities and services you can access in CLI via cur … | Continue reading
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! Choosing the right prefix can be a real head scratcher, so Josh presents some great tips this week. Do you want to save time and typing with text shortcuts … | Continue reading
Thanks to Orchard Resales for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! If you’re looking for an older Mac mini to use as a server or entertainment center, you can pick up used 2012/2014 models dirt cheap! I use a 2012 Mac mi … | Continue reading
Thanks to Sanebox for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! I’ve been using it for years and I can’t imagine my email inbox without it. Drowning in emails? Enter SaneBox — your lifesaver. It’s a VIP service that sif … | Continue reading
I’m afraid you’ve been seeing a lot of sponsored posts and not enough posts from me lately, so I thought I’d try to explain why. After a relationship in my life was destabilized and I had an outsized reaction to it, I started trying to figure out what was going on with me. I was … | Continue reading
Thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I am a huge fan of BetterTouchTool and use it all day every day on my Mac. I wouldn’t know what to do without it. From customizing my keyboard shortcuts to adding infinite gestures to my trackpad to running my … | Continue reading
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I recently had a great time doing a panel about my use of TextExpander for the TextExpander Virtual Summit, and got to talk about how I’ve been using TextExpander since the very beginning, tips I’ve learned, and w … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Setapp. Get access to hundreds of Mac and iOS apps for one low monthly subscription fee. Post-Twitter Diaspora Options Some opinions on Mastodon and Bluesky. Personally I wish ill of Bluesky and have high hopes for Mastodon. Bu … | Continue reading
As I’ve said before, I’m a long time user and lover of Sanebox. Thanks to them for sponsoring again this week. Here’s a user story from Thomas Yuan. Well, here’s a funny thing: I started using SaneBox because my email was a … | Continue reading