Pile of Dross

As my iBook isn’t owned by work, I’m slightly leery about connecting it to work systems – so when at work I connect through the public wireless network and I don’t use VPN either. Which means that I’ve got a growing collection of ssh tunnels to get to the internal pages I need to see. Up until now I’d never gone much further than that, but with my resolution to use Textmate more there was an obvious direction – mounting my work unix account home directory on my Mac using FUSE and sshfs, which is shockingly easy – download some packages from the macfuse page, restart, configure and its done.

Though I have discovered why Apple is adding widescreen displays to everything – it so that there’s enough room for all the little menu items – when Firefox is the active application there’s only room for 1 more icon and that’s only because I turned off displaying the bluetooth status.

When I first got my iBook I bought a license for TextMate shortly afterwards. however it has always been somewhat under used – until now. Doing the digital equivalent of searching for loose change down the back of the sofa, I found a 15ukp gift certificate from Amazon that had been caught by SpamAssassin, so I put it towards a copy of TextMate Power Editing for the Mac.

Now one of the cool features of TextMate is that it installs an InputManager that allows you to open the text in editable text areas in other applications in TextMate for editing, however this only really work with Cocoa applications – native Mac OS X applications typically – so it works in Safari but not Firefox (Though Safari might be out of luck in the near future if the rumours turn out to be true). As I prefer Firefox to Safari, the next question to ask is there a Cocoa version of Firefox that would work? Well yes there is, 2 actually – Camino and the alpha release of Firefox 3; however neither worked properly for me.

So, thwarted in that angle of attack, the next avenue to explore is “Is it possible to simulate this behaviour in Firefox”, and indeed it is : Mozex is an addon for firefox that allows you to use external programs for various actions in Firefox – editing text areas being one, simply enter the path to the TextMate command line binary and set a key combination.

I’ve also added the GetBundle and the MediaWiki bundles to TextMate – the first to make it easier to add the second.