brian hefele's untidy space

Left to right: TEC PicoPen, Muyshondt Aeon, Leatherman Squirt P4

After acquiring the Muyshondt Aeon as an everyday carry keychain light, I realized I had no good way to get the light onto my keychain. I could have simply attached the split ring to my keychain, much as the Leatherman in the above picture is. But I really wanted a way to quickly detach the light, leaving its split ring free to fold under for the sake of compactness and tailstanding. So I ordered some tiny McGizmo gate clips from Lighthound (not affiliated, but a seller I trust), and wanted to bulk up my order a bit to make the shipping worth it. Enter the PicoPen by TEC accessories.

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A while back, I tested and reviewed a slew of text editors for the Mac. Since then, I had primarily stuck with two editors - CotEditor for the stripped-down HTML of these blog posts, and TextWrangler for more serious coding. In my past, I'd made a point of learning Vi(m) for a handful of reasons:

• Need for a powerful text editor to quickly make edits from CLI
• Inclusion of Vi(m) is a requirement for POSIX-compliance
• Same as above, but more specifically, re: SSH
• Emacs sucks

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I spend a lot of time in plaintext editors. Among other things, I write my poetry in Markdown syntax, I code occasionally (and block out DVD Studio Pro scripts), and I write these blog entries, built of much text and a handful of html tags. Depending on the task at hand, I'll work under the command line - aee, nano, or vim. Yet for some tasks, I simply want to sit in my cuddly Cocoa environment, and allow myself to fall pray to all its distractions.

So, for a long time, my weapon of choice was TextWrangler, the free text editor that anyone who's in the know installs as soon as they get a new Mac. TextWrangler has been my standby for as long as I've been a Mac user. Recently, I decided to try out some of the alternatives, however - three paid apps, and one free.

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