Excursus

As I mentioned in my initial post, learning 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. Check it out to get a sense of the potential of this underappreciated utility.

While on the topic of ATPM, Ted Goranson in his column about outliners (text editors that allow multiple views of a document based on its logical structure), will be writing about writing environments next month. If you are not yet familiar with this fascinating column, the archives are a rewarding read.