Christmas came early for TextMate enthusiasts with the alpha release of TM2. However, along with the glad tidings, the much reviled project drawer has passed. The drawer, according to Kirk McElhearn, was a badly designed UI element. An optional display of additional information, the drawer extended out from the main window. McElhearn was not alone […]
Footnotes. I count among their critics. At least in the context of professional philosophical writing. Indeed the descent of footnotes in philosophical essays closely mirrors its increasing professionalization. Of course, some of the ends in the use of footnotes are not without merit. For example, it may be useful to locate your discussion in the […]
Branching for Academic Writers Branching and merging is one of the great things about Git. You might wonder why branching is useful for writing. Three quick reasons: First, it’s best practice to work on a development branch and periodically merge the results into the master branch. That way you can be confident about what’s on […]
What is the name of this book? I honestly cannot tell. The spine and front cover have “Basic Writings” before “Martin Heidegger”, but this ordering is reversed in the two (sic!) interior title pages. The back cover refers to the book as “Basic Writings”, but that is clearly shorthand, and does not settle the matter […]
Being able to view diffs is an essential part of the workflow in keeping your LaTeX documents under version control. (You are using a version control system, right?) One limitation of diff software is that they tend to display line differences. Since paragraphs in LaTeX tend to be long lines, multiple differences within a paragraph […]
The Git Users Survey 2009 is out. If you are a Git user, take the time to fill it out.
Flashbake aims to bring version control to writers—or at least writers who have harnessed the power of plain text. Flahsbake is a simplified front end to Git that runs in the background automatically committing changes and recording various ambient information as you write (such as what you were listening to when the commit was made). […]
For art in printing is not the way Of wild extravagance, weird display, But rather the unobtrusive thrall Of type that gives you no shock at all, But draws your eye to the page with zest And holds your mind to the thought expressed; We must keep ourselves to this simple creed, Type was made […]
Advanced features of LaTeX are best learned on a need to know basis. The LaTeX Companion can be daunting in its length. If you thought you needed to master all of that material before writing a LaTeX document you would never do so. So start simple, and learn how to do more advanced things as […]
More evidence of typographic rage: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I have posted on this phenomenon before, here, here, here, and here. Perhaps I need a new tag for this issue. However, it’s the difference wherein the interest lies. Unlike obsessing about straight versus typographic quotes this is more straightforwardly a “semantic” issue about […]
Playing with your bash prompt can seem like nothing more than an idle diversion. It is an idle diversion, it is just the “nothing more” bit that I would argue with. In a previous post I discussed how the bash prompt can reflect what git branch you are on. Now that’s useful. Seriously. But what […]
As I have remarked before, good typography does not merely have aesthetic virtue. Importantly, it has cognitive virtue as well. Good typesetting makes your work easier to understand. A good font is but one element of typesetting, and a font may be appropriate to one context but not others. Still, font choice is one of […]
Well that didn’t take long. In an earlier post, I remarked that with command line support for Gist, the git powered pastebin service, TextMate support for Gist was now within reach. There is now a gist command in the GitHub bundle. You can either post private or public gists. The gist that figured in the […]
The Problem One of the great features of using TextMate to produce LaTeX documents is the TODO Bundle. The TODO Bundle let’s you to insert TODOs into comments and display these in a nicely formatted HTML window with links to the lines where the TODOs occurred.12 There are two limitations with the TODO Bundle, however, […]
Would you really want to blog from your iPhone? While Twitter apps really come into their own on mobile devices, blogging is a longer form not well suited for text input on an iPhone. Nevertheless, part of me is glad that it can be done. This post is being written on my iPhone thanks to […]
Git commits by day and hour on the Philosophy BibTeX project. Been working on some scripts to clean up the BibTeX file, to normalize cite keys, to render consistent author and journal names, to strip out local URLs, etc. So look forward to a new development branch and a directory of utilities.
Donald Knuth is renowned for offering a bounty for bugs found in TeX. Many of these checks remain forever uncashed, the recipients rightly regarding the signed check an honor greater than the money it represents. Sadly, this practice has come to an end. No Donald Kuth has not died, nor is he, like Ringo Starr, […]
Google Book Search, a surprisingly controversial if welcome Google app, has reached a ground breaking settlement. See here. A highlight: US users—alas not me, an expatriate American—will have access to out of print but not out of copyright books as well as the ability to buy these. Of course there is more. See also the […]
Akismet, Matt Mullenweg’s anti-spam WordPress plugin, now provides statistics. These statistics are displayed in useful graphics. In checking them out, I was struck by the following graph: That’s a sharp downturn in spam. I know that this is a little read technical blog by an academic, but there has been no corresponding downturn in traffic […]
Leopard’s terminal was a huge improvement, but issues remain. One of the welcome additions to the terminal was tabs, but there is no way to name them. With a number of tabs open, this can make navigation tedious. If only there were a convenient way to name tabs. Thanks to Erik Anderson there is. Terminal.app […]
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