i/o

I really, really like Textmate. It is fast, powerful, and incredibly easy to script and customize.

But it has a few incredibly annoying weaknesses. The worst of these is an abysmal indentation model. (The second worst is terrible support for large files and projects, but I haven’t solved that yet.)

Happily, I ran across this nice post to indent R files using Emacs in batch mode from Textmate. A very simple and effective idea (Emacs afficionados are of course scoffing, why not use Emacs? Why not? Because I still haven’t found the button to zap-phrase-long-counter-intuitive-command-names-out-of-the-1970s-and-into-a-modern-ui).

I did a reworking in Ruby that can handle any file type for which an Emacs mode is installed, which is specified as a command-line argument to the script. So just put the Ruby script somewhere (it probably should go in a Textmate support directory, but I just put it in a personal script dir), and then create a ‘Tidy’ command in Textmate for each desired language, specifying an appropriate file ending to tell Emacs the language. For example:

/path/to/tidy.rb cpp   # C++

/path/to/tidy.rb java   # Java

/path/to/tidy.rb ml      # OCaml

Voilà!

Again, the script (you’ll need to rename and make executable): tidy.rb

Here is a patch against OpenFST (beta-20070801) that adds CMake build support. It pretty much duplicates the existing make files. I tested on Mac OS 10.5.2 (Leopard) and Ubuntu (8.04 64-bit). While in principle builds for Visual Studio on Windows can now be generated, the OpenFST code itself is not yet portable. I didn’t try Cygwin, but it might work.

(Note: The p2 patch adds header installation to the earlier version.)

I happen to be crazed enough to run KDE on my Mactop. Actually, I run it for one application: Kile. Yes, Kile. Though I would prefer to use something like LyX, the main reason I suffer LaTeX is the convenience of having your papers and, maybe even, thesis formatted to specification automatically. LyX doesn’t work on LaTeX files directly, however, so I am paranoid about whether it will format everything exactly the same as LaTeX, and anyway I find LaTeX hacking in LyX a bit clumsy. So at some point I switched to working with LaTeX directly, but the general philosophy of LaTeX editor user interface design seems to be: Let’s stuff as many thousands of little toolbar buttons as we can for all the obscure commands, environments, and, especially mathematical symbols.

Except for Kile. Which still sucks since it doesn’t have WYSIWYG or at least real-time preview, but at least they figured out that dynamic command completion is really frigging useful. So that’s what I use.

But there’s one big problem: I can’t copy from a Mac application to Kile. Or any KDE application for that matter. As the following post discusses

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2007-July/004451.html

you can paste to other X11 applications using the mouse middle button (option-click) (see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html), but it doesn’t work for KDE apps. Unfortunately the post hasn’t been answered, but I finally figured out a not-so-odious work-around: Just run xclipboard.

Yes, old, crusty, xclipboard in all of its Athena widget glory scoops up your native Mac copying activity and magically makes it available to KDE applications with the usual Control-v.

So that’s why today’s UNIX GUI distros still dump hundreds of old and often redundant X applications. Sometimes you actually need them!