Roadrunner Twice

K, idk if y’all have ever messed around with the iOS “Shortcuts” app, but it turns out it is Legit.

So. On my Mac, I use a pair of oddball note-taking systems that I made out of baling wire, scrap lumber, and keyboard shortcuts over a decade ago and have been using daily ever since:

• “Garbage Book” is just a clone of Apple Notes,* except that it uses my normal text editor instead of a separate app that I don’t like as much.

• “FMP”** is, uh, baroque. There's a hotkey to get a text field that appends to a special text file. If I append a line that starts with something like ^didread, it’ll eventually get moved to a file like didread.txt (courtesy of a second hotkey that refreshes everything). And there’s yet another hotkey for quickly opening one of those note files by name.

  (I do realize what that all sounds like to a normal person, but trust me, it's a specialized ADHD workaround that solves some particular annoyances for me in a really sweet way.)

Since both sets of notes are just plain text files in a synced folder, I've always been able to access them on my phone. But it was way more awkward and slow, and I've always been on the lookout for ways to improve it.

Anyway, yesterday my dad was having brain surgery (he's doing fine, everything went great), and here's a thing about when someone close to you has major surgery: you sit around for a long-ass time, and you can't concentrate on any actual responsibilities for the whole duration (basically because the entire part of your mind that gives a flying fuck about responsibilities is wholly occupied with reacting whenever it's time to do something for said loved one). But a really frivolous and finicky project can be a great way to not obsess at 20,000 RPM over hypothetical stuff that you can't do anything about, so I decided to crack open that Shortcuts app that came out with iOS 12 and see if there was anything to it.

THERE IS. The card-based editing interface is weird as heck (it has some real strengths for programming on a touchscreen, but it also makes refactoring a pain in the ass, and was probably not intended for use on an iPhone SE), and the lack of some basic niceties like and/or expressions is pretty embarrassing (you can implement boolean logic yourself by adding more variables, but it looks like legit hell), but behind all that is a remarkably functional little scripting language with a coherent and consistent core and really unmatched discoverability.

It's probably even nicer for scripting apps that provide "real" Shortcuts actions, but even with just iA Writer's URL-based scripting and the built-in actions, I was able to completely*** re-implement both Garbage Book and FMP on my telephone over the course of two afternoons!

I now have little buttons on my "today" view for starting a new Garbage Book page, appending a line to my dump file, opening an FMP ^caret-tag file by name, and sorting ^caret-tag lines out of the dump file and into their real homes. (That was the one I didn't think would even be possible, but I totally did it!) And it all plays nicely with the edifice of Mac scripts that I've been using since '06.

Anyway, very satisfying results, a very impressive tool, also A+ distraction for that mandatory fret-in-the-hospital downtime.

_____

* Except this was ca. 2007 so it was more like a clone of Notational Velocity.

** Fast Memo Pencil? Fiendish Master Plan? Free Mashed Potatoes?

*** Wellll mostly completely. There's one thing I couldn't do on my phone from the original Garbage Book script: include part of the first line of text in the filename. That was always a nice feature, but c'est la vie; it's just a problem of different editing paradigms. In BBEdit I start by opening an empty editor window and typing for a while before hitting the Garbage Book hotkey to save, but in iA Writer I have to start by creating the file, so there's no first line of text to grab. I guess the editor itself could update the filename (Notes does this!), but it would have to know about my timestamped naming scheme to do that.

For the last six years or so, I’ve used this thing called MagicPrefs to add a middle click to my laptop trackpad and to the Apple "Magic Mouse."

(Why am I using a magic mouse? Well.

• I mouse lefty because me and my wrist tendons Made A Deal, and ambi mice are weirdly rare. I guess all the lefties are mousing righty.
  • I also type Dvorak because I'm hostile to all carbon-based life.
• I hate tall contoured mice that make me arch my hand, WHY is this considered acceptable ergonomics??? The MM is the flattest mouse I've ever seen.
• Horizontal scrolling rules.
• Whole-hand left-clicking [as opposed to one-finger] rules.

I should probably just get an external trackpad, tho.)

But anyway, MagicPrefs is weird old abandonware, and I'm a li'l concerned about its future, so I’m turning it off for a few days to see if I can handle living without a middle click.

Results so far are mixed, by which I mean I feel like I'm going out of my mind.

tell application "Skim"

set current_file to file of document of window 1

tell window 1 to close

tell application "Finder" to delete current_file

end tell

It has officially been months since I've wasted everyone's time talking about computer bullshit up in here, so let's geek out for a second.

• Git is the shit and I'm basically in love with it. That's pretty much all there is to say about that.
• I'm out of love with Simplenote, alas. It was the first iPad writing app that made sense to me, but it started corrupting my text (while I was watching, even!), which is pretty much the one thing I just can't forgive in an app. After I lost a sentence in one of my Turkey diaries and couldn't remember what it'd been, I ditched Simplenote for good, got a Dropbox account, and started using PlainText instead. It's better in some ways (it plays very well with Garbage Book and FMP, for instance) and worse in a few (no search), but since it hasn't thrown away part of my brain as of yet, it currently wins by default.
  • By the way, Dropbox is the shit and I'm basically in love with it. Yes, I am late to the fucking party; what of it.

• The developer of PlainText also has a to-do list app called TaskPaper, and after extensive consideration I have decided that—evidence of an unfortunate addiction to InterCaps aside—it rocks. The deal is that I've tried working with task managing apps before, and I apparently can't handle any of their interfaces; if it's more complicated than a piece of paper or a text editor buffer, it gets in my way and I eventually just stop using it. (Bonus Kill It W/ Fire points for any app that has a concept of calendar-tied due dates.) Which, fine: I've always just fallen back to using paper or a text editor buffer, and they're perfectly respectable tools.

  As far as I'm concerned, the following are the only problems with using paper and text for to-do lists:

  • They're hard to maintain. Eventually, a to-do list is going to get clogged up with finished tasks, and the only cure is to spend way too long on either re-writing it or deleting the dross.
  • They're not very introspectable. You can do a single-aspect hierarchy pretty easily, but it's a lot more annoying to, say, make an ad-hoc sub-view of tasks you've picked to do today or which have to happen when you're at home.
  • Also, and this is basically less important than anything but it gets on my nerves anyway? "Crossing out" an item in plaintext is kind of fiddly and abstract. Like, how do you even do that? Put an "x" in front of the line? Turn the - bullet into a +? Guh.

  TaskPaper solves all of those without actually making the interface any more complicated than paper or a text buffer, so it wins. I used up its 30-day trial and thought it wasn't really all that special, and then I proceded to get incredibly annoyed at its absence on an almost daily basis, so I ponied up. If you like to-do lists, you should give it a try too.

• I think my favorite thing about that rubberized iPad folio Apple makes is how schmutzy and gross it gets. No, seriously, I mean it. It signals that its contents are for use and/or abuse, and for someone with a mild fear of Owning Nice Things, that's more useful than it sounds. Also, the unique patterns of filth make it easier to tell otherwise-identical iPads apart.
• So in Vim, the D key generally indicates destruction, right? dd = delete the current line; D = delete to end of line? Except that ctrl-d means scroll down half a page. This is my Vim face: -_-

I've been dicking around with all kinds of computer shit lately! It is way exciting, you don't even know. Well, you're about to know, I mean. You know.

Item one! I'm learning Perl! High time, I know, especially considering my living situation. Basically, I have a hard time learning a large system without a project, so my tactic was to let an (if we're being honest here) totally trivial and absurd potential project take up enough of my mental space that I would basically be forced to learn it. I am getting very close to wanting to share the result, because it basically works now, but it's got a silly dependency chain, it's hella slow, and there are one or two known bugs. I'm pretty sure I can fix all of these! So you'll see it eventually, and it'll make your life better, because it's the shit. Even if it is trivial and absurd.

Item two! If you have an iPad, stop what you're doing and immediately download Simplenote. After it's all set up and you've made an account, download Notational Velocity (assuming you use a Mac), set it up to sync with Simplenote, and change the storage schema to plain text files. The effect is AMAZING; basically, it's a single pile of notes that's always effortlessly in sync on all relevant devices.

It's basically obvious what to do from there, but I did have one trick I wanted to share, which is that if you want a shortcut to open a note in a different text editor from its representation in NV, you can highlight the note title with cmd-L, grab the text with a OS X Service, and use Applescript to turn that into a real file path and open it. Like this, more or less:

on process(inputText)
    set notefilename to ((path to application support folder from user domain) ¬
as string) & "Notational Data:" & inputText & ".txt"
    tell application "BBEdit"
        open notefilename
        activate
    end tell
end process

To be used with ThisService, natch. I think there'll be a more elegant way to do this in the next version of NV, but this works.

I played with Scrivener during November, and had decidedly mixed feelings about it. So I decided I should give the other main IDEs-for-prose a shot! My feelings about them were decidedly un-mixed.

Ulysses 2.0: I tried the first version back in '06 or so and loathed it, but my tastes have changed, and I figured its focus on markup-based* formatting might appeal more to me than Scrivener's NSTextView WYSIWYG. Yeah, no. God no. This program runs so counter to the way my brain works that I actually have a hard time imagining the existence of people who find it useful.** It has all the failings of an integrated writing environment, but it consciously rejects all of the benefits. I absolutely remember why I threw it aside last time and just went with BBEdit and a folder fulla text files.

StoryMill: Also no dice; even reading through the tutorial file made my head kind of spin. The dealkiller here was how much fidgeting and toggling and administrative nonsense you have to go through to do anything. Are you typing in the "Notes," or the "Text," or the "Chapter?" It's all the same text field, and you have to constantly fiddle with these controls at the top to make sure you're in the right place, which, NO, I have better things to do with my attention. (Also! It failed at importing some UTF8 text files and spat mojibake throughout. WTF? This is 2009, yo, I should not need to babysit charset conversion.)

In the meantime, it turned out that Scrivener'd made a good enough case for its utility during the trial period that I did, in fact, miss it. I have issues with it, but it's... actually a pretty good implementation of something that will make part of what I do a whole lot easier. And it fits with my current write-in-bits-on-the-train thing really really well. So, I bought it.

* Just for the record, what bugs me most about WYSIWYG composition is modal emphasis with no indicator. As in, you're looking at the screen and there is a blinking cursor: when you type something, is it going to be bold or italic? WHO KNOWS. Drives me bats. (Brief props: MS Word slants the cursor when you're in itals, which is cool. Everyone should do that, and make it blocky when you're in bold. That would solve the problem perfectly. But I seem to be the only person who's infuriated by the current situation, so whatever. Grumph.)

** Obviously they're around, and I am glad they enjoy it. Space aliens deserve good software too!

HERE IS THE UPDATE.

• I went with my parents and brother to see Ian Anderson last night! And it was amazing. I can't really name Jethro Tull as my favorite band or anything, but they've kind of always been there as a constant presence in my life, and it was truly wonderful to finally see someone I... well, basically grew up with.
• I went alone to go see The Mountain Goats on Wednesday night (again, I'm trying to get back into my old live music groove). Totally bitchin' show, and my first time to the Wonder Ballroom. (Which is in walking distance of my apartment, as it turns out!) I also ended up running into Steve and Sara after the show, which was lovely.
• Work is work. It's taking up a lot of my energy, and I've been thinking various thoughts about how to wall it off a little better.

• I upgraded my OS, finally. (After hearing a couple of horror stories, I decided to wait until 10.6.2 dropped before braving it. Worked like a charm.) My favorite Snow Leopard feature so far:

  

  'Nuff said. It's basically the same damn thing, but I do like what they did with Exposé and a couple other things.

• When I'm not working or sleeping or eating or writing or learning Cocoa or reading the internet, I've been playing Final Fantasy XII. Yes, I am behind the times. I'm not very far in it, but I'm liking it a LOT. Also, I realize the battle system was meant as a way to integrate developments from the Massively Multiplayer side of the RPG family tree into the divergent JRPG branch, but honestly, what the experience of it reminds me most of is Secret of Mana. And hurray for that.
• You guys are reading Homestuck, right? You had better be reading Homestuck.

Bikeshop accomplished! I overhauled my headset! Even better, duder and I solved a mystery. Since I've had Brigadelle, her headset has had an irritating tendency to loosen itself over time. At first, I was like what the fuck; after I'd adjusted it once or twice, I started chalking it up to me not reefing down hard enough on the locknut. Then, after the pros at Olybikes tightened it down (it was in for something else and they were like "whoa"), it came loose AGAIN, after which I once again didn't know what the hell was going on. But today... Today, I learned the shocking truth.

( Cut for the interesting but not actually particularly shocking truth. )

Dep't of Disseminating Vital Information: To tell whether your headset is de-adjusted, you basically raise the front of your bike by the handlebars and drop it back down on the wheel, and if it clanks instead of thudding, consider getting it looked at. Alternately, you can lift the front end of the bike, keep the bars straight, and pull/push the wheel+fork forward and back, and if it rocks and clanks, trouble. It's generally not a life-threatening issue, but the longer you ride on a maladjusted component, the more likely you are to need expensive repairs down the line.

(Supposedly you're supposed to get your headset overhauled once a year, but I'm pretty sure this one hadn't been dismantled since at least 2006.)

Also, I gave in and bought myself a fancy-pants Apple chiclet keyboard. Bit of a splurge, but I'm already way more comfortable at this desk, and it's just going to make reading and writing a shit-ton easier. It's a tool of my damn trade; I figure it's worth it. (Plus, it looks like they're popular enough to actually hold their value well, so a: getting one used won't save you any real money, and b: if times get tight, I can sell it for 70-80% of its new price.)

I got a wired one, because I still have a functional wired Mighty Mouse to use with it, and I went with the big version with the numerical pad. My theory is that Apple dropped the 10-key pad from the new pack-in keyboards because these side-by-side keyboards are a kind of hacky design, and are really only suited for right-handed people who mouse with their left hands. —Which is to say, me.