One of the unexpected benefits of OS X was my rediscovery of UNIX. Prior to that, I had dim memories of a rarely used UNIX account when I was in college in the mid-eighties. The GUI of the newly installed Macs in some of the computer labs was a welcome relief from what I regarded as the obscure incantations of the command line. Word processing in a GUI environment seemed a genuine advance in the technology of writing, and I was hooked.
I was also wrong.
While I would never go back to working entirely in a terminal, I now understand that the ascendancy of the GUI represents the triumph of the Image over the Word. The visual editing of word processing provided merely the illusion of control and was, in fact, inimical to writing.
In exploring the UNIX underpinnings of OS X, I was pleased to discover that a lot of tools that programmers use are, in fact, readily adaptable to the task of writing.
In dumping word processing for something better, I received a lot of help from people sharing their knowledge online. As thanks and a small token of respect, I will be posting some of what I have learned here.
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[…] As I mentioned in my initial post, coming to learn about the UNIX underpinnings of OS X was a revelation. While I would never like to work exclusively in a text based terminal, a lot of UNIX utilities can be exploited by writers as well as coders. While visual editing familiar from word processors tends to obscure the semantic structure of complex documents, the GUI has its place even in the manipulation of text. There is an interesting class of applications that I like to think of as hybrid apps. The least interesting of these are merely GUI wrappers of command line utilities. Others, however, add value to these utilities by allowing the user to interact with them in novel and useful ways. One example that deserves special mention is Apple’s FileMerge that allows for the visual comparison of text files. I will be blogging more about FileMerge, but for now, here is a screenshot: Another hybrid application from Apple is Activity Monitor. Of course a lot of the information displayed by Activity Monitor can be accessed by top in the terminal, but there’s more besides. In a How To article in About This Particular MacIntosh Sylester Roque begins the first part of a review of the Activity Monitor. Filed under: Blog | […]
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