First, an introduction to a series. I have realized that when I want to find the best piece of software for a given category, I read some reviews, I check out screenshots, but mainly I install every player in the category and put them all through their paces. This should be evident from my roundup of Mac text editors. In my head, I rate them for many things, and figure out which suits me best. But aside from just writing rambling reviews, I figure I should make these raw evaluations more readily available. So I would like to regularly review a pile of apps in a given category, and accompany them with comma- and/or tab-delimited tables. In the future I will also compile these tables into a regularly-updated SQLite database. Today is terminal emulators, of which there are apparently more than just Terminal.app and iTerm.
brian hefele's untidy space
Terminal Emulation on the Mac
ep - ELinks as pager
I spend a good deal of time inside a terminal. Text-based apps are powerful, when you know what you're doing, and fast (also when you know what you're doing, I suppose). If an equivalent Cocoa or X11 GUI tool offers me little advantage, I'm probably going to stick to either a CLI- or TUI-based piece of software. One of the more important, taken-for-granted pieces of the command line environment is that of the pager. Typically, one would use something like more or less for their pager. For a while, I used w3m as my pager, as well as my text-based web browser. Then Snow Leopard came out, and everything from MacPorts got totally jacked up and left much of my system jacked up as well. Parts of it I've fixed, other parts I've been lazy about. For that reason, or perhaps not, I have transitioned to ELinks as my text-based web browser. Today, after recent discussions with a friend regarding w3m and ELinks, I had a thought - why not use ELinks as my pager as well?
dc Syntax for Vim
I use dc as my primary calculator for day-to-day needs. I use other calculators as well, but I try to largely stick to dc for two reasons - I was raised on postfix (HP 41CX, to be exact) and I'm pretty much guaranteed to find dc on any *nix machine I happen to come across. Recently, however, I've been expanding my horizons, experimenting with dc as a programming environment, something safe and comfortable to use as a mental exercise. All of that is another post for another day, however - right now I want to discuss writing a dc syntax definition for vim.