Linked List: March 20, 2024

Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Apple Support: ‘Manuals, Specs, and Downloads’ ★

New home page for Apple Support documentation. Worth a bookmark.

Update: It’s so comprehensive that it has tech specs — but alas, not the documentation — going back to the original 1984 Macintosh.

Keyboard Maestro 11 ★

Another recent-ish update to one of my essential Mac utilities:

Keyboard Maestro 11 expands on the powerful base of previous versions, improving the editor, adding many new actions and triggers, New Macro Wizard, a new Security preference pane, a keyboardmaestro command line tool, support for Apple Text Recognition, and more. Keyboard Maestro 11 requires macOS 10.13 High Sierra or later.

My number one tip for anyone looking to up their Mac power-user game is to get Keyboard Maestro. It’s like having super powers. $36 for a new license, $25 to upgrade. And of course there’s a free trial.

BBEdit 15 ★

BBEdit 15.0.2 just shipped, which reminded me that I never linked to BBEdit 15. Most interesting and useful to me, among many new features:

There’s a new document type, “ChatGPT Worksheet”. This is created from File → New as with other document types, and provides an interface for conversational exchanges with ChatGPT. In order to use this feature, you will need a ChatGPT account, and an API key. [...]

ChatGPT worksheets work similarly to a shell worksheet: type something in, and press the Enter key to send it to ChatGPT. (You can also use the “Send Command” keyboard equivalent, as set in the “Worksheets” section of BBEdit’s “Menus & Shortcuts” preferences. The default for this command is Control-Return.) After some period of time, you’ll receive a response which BBEdit will insert into the document window.

If you wish to cancel your request before the response arrives, Command-period or Control-C will do that.

Responses from ChatGPT are automatically quoted, as long as the worksheet’s language is set to “Markdown”. If you change the worksheet’s language, this quoting will not occur.

(Since worksheets are Markdown, you can use “Preview in BBEdit” on a worksheet to visualize it.)

Because chats depend heavily on history, a worksheet saves your prompts and the server’s responses. Thus, the document size will grow over time and context is preserved, even if you delete previous prompts and responses from the text area.

BBEdit ChatGPT worksheets are my favorite interface to ChatGPT in general, but they particularly shine when using ChatGPT for programming advice. It’s so convenient to have the chat in a freeform format right there in your text editor.

Other tentpole new features include a minimap palette, customizable cheat sheets, and significant improvements to “projects”. BBEdit remains my favorite app in the world. $60 for a new license, $30 to upgrade from an older version, or $4/month or $40/year from the Mac App Store.