5/02/2009
Scenario: You’re working with the Flex SDK and you’re tracing messages to the Terminal via flashlog.txt. The damn logfile has heaps of clutter in it from the last project you were working on, and you want to clean it up.
Solution: Save this snippet and assign it a Quicksilver hotkey:
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| try
do shell script "rm ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/Logs/flashlog.txt"
do shell script "touch ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/Logs/flashlog.txt"
end try |
Result: You are happy. Go drink beer.
17/01/2009
Scenario: You are browsing in Safari (because it’s speedier than Firefox) and feel the urge to inspect the site in Firebug or the Web Dev Toolbar.
Solution: Save this script and activate it from QuickSilver.
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| tell application "Safari"
activate
set theUrl to the URL in document 1
end tell
tell application "Firefox"
activate
OpenURL theUrl
end tell |
Result: You are happy. Have a coffee.
9/01/2009
I use a 15″ MacBook Pro that I carry between work and home. At work I have a 30″ Cinema Display which means I can actually have half of the Flash IDE showing at once. Mostly it’s plug and play but every once in a while some app just doesn’t realize that I’ve unplugged the huge display and some window ends up at some awkward position where I have to drag it out and resize it, or even worse; It ends up outside the boundaries of the laptop screen altogether.
AppleScript to the rescue. Copy this script and save it into your AppleScripts folder. You can assign it to a Quicksilver hotkey if you’d like, but I find it’s convenient enough to just launch it from Quicksilver in the usual manner.
What it does is simply resizing the window and centering it on the display. There are more elegant ways to do this, but this one works even with apps that have little or no support for AppleScript at all. You can adjust the lines:
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| set position to {220, 50}
set size to {1000, 800} |
to fit your screen real estate as those values are set to center on a 1440 / 900 display.
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| tell application "System Events"
set frontmostProcess to name of first item of ¬
(processes whose frontmost is true)
tell process frontmostProcess
tell window 1
set position to {100, 0}
set size to {1200, 800}
end tell
end tell
end tell |
9/12/2008
Just encountered bliss deep down in the Quicksilver Google Groups forum. I was trying to save myself a keystroke as usual. More specifically; I often open folders and files in TextMate, and the steps for doing so with Quicksilver are
- 1: Type the first few letters of the folder/file.
- 2: Tab over to the next pane and type “wi” to bring up “Open with” instead of “Open”.
- 3: Tab over to once more and type “te” to bring up TextMate.
- 4: Hit return.
Which is, I suppose, not too bad. However I wanted the flow to be more like this:
- 1: Find the folder/file
- 2: Type in “wi” to bring up a custom action to open the file in TextMate.
- 3: Hit return.
No, it’s not a major step but every single keystroke matters. And besides; This specific action isn’t really the point here.
The point is that to my amazement there wasn’t any simple way to assign a abbreviation to this type of action. That is; an action that needs input in more than one pane. Being a stubborn bastard I started sniffing around on how I could create my own Quicksilver plugin to perform this seemingly simple task. It seemed however that to create a Quicksilver plugin the way to go was Objective-C which I don’t know (the books are shipping from Amazon as we speak). I sat down to make a go at it in XCode, but I just had to give up before I broke something.
Then; Severely undocumented for such a wonderful feature, it turns out that Quicksilver commands can be written in AppleScript. I don’t mean the fact that you can run AppleScripts from Quicksilver, although that’s nice as well. You can actually create commands that’ll behave just like the native commands in Quicksilver, such as “Reveal”, “Copy to…” or “Go to path in Terminal”. With AppleScript being a ridiculously easy language to get started with , this is huge news.
It means that instead of getting to grips with the intimidating world of XCode, my problem could be solved in four human-readable lines:
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| on open these_items
tell application "TextMate" to open these_items
tell application "TextMate" to activate
end open |
The trick is in the opening line
refers to the current selection in the first pane, and after that you can use the variable
to manipulate with AppleScript all you want. When you’re happy with your script, copy it to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions and restart Quicksilver. You might also want to go into the Quicksilver preferences and give it a higher priority, or alternatively assign it to an abbreviation.
Have fun!
10/09/2008
Summary: In which Martin ponders solutions on how to quickly switch themes in TextMate and comes up with a half-assed AppleScript / TM Command solution. Jump to the half-assed solution.
Edit: As these things usually go I had a bit of a revelation just minutes after posting this post. Completely by accident I typed the keystroke ⇧-⌃-⌥-T, which of course is mapped to the “Select Theme” – command in the Experimental Bundle and which I had completely and utterly purged from my mind. I’m pretty sure you want to use that solution rather than the one I outline in this post, but I’ll keep this around for posterity’s sake anyway. Original post follows.
I’m about to start teaching a 5 week class in ActionScript 3 and if there’s any possible way to avoid it, I won’t spend much time in the IDE code editor, because frankly; It sucks. So in order to make the differences between what the students will see on the screen (You guessed it. TextMate.) and what they’ll be working in themselves, at least initially, I played around with one of the themes in TextMate to make it look more like the Flash IDE editor.
From my beloved Twilight theme:
To this IDE clone based on IDLE:
So since I’ll keep using my main theme for all my professional work I wanted a fast way of switching between the two themes (I’ll do a lot of work to save myself from dealing with a drop down menu). A bit of googling (actually a fair bit of googling) turned up this gem from a spanish speaking TextMate google group. Now, before you even start; Yes I feel slightly dirty about GUI-scripting as well. Making a script that simulates clicks rather than one that just tells the OS to perform whatever task associated with said click just feels wrong. But since not even a journeyman when it comes to the arcane arts of programming TextMate I’m just going to bite the bullet until someone (you?) comes up with a better solution.
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