Beyond Compare for OS X?

Many developers moving from Windows to OS X will find that one valued application "Beyond Compare" has no mac equivalent.

Recently a new visual diff application has come out that works very well (for a 1.0). It integrates nicely with Textmate and the OS X terminal. While not as feature-complete and polished as Beyond Compare it does give you the meat & potatoes of what you need - folder and file diffing.

I encourage you to try it out but remember this is 1.0 software. For example, see my screenshot of a folder diff. Notice how the file/folder names are abbreviated even when there is ample room for display.

Intellij IDEA, OS X Leopard Spaces, Fixed with J2SE 6

Looks like the Java 1.6 update finally fixes the Java Swing/Spaces issues that have been so annoying for the last 10 months or so. Yay.

Tile OS X Terminal window to Finder with AppleScript

I updated my AppleScript that will tile the terminal window nicely below the frontmost finder window.

For some reason setting the Terminal window bounds is very buggy. I resorted to using the deprecated methods {position and size} and have to loop it three times to ensure that it positions correctly.

I tied this to command-; in my app launcher, QuickSilver

tell application "Finder"
 --make new Finder window
 activate
 if not (exists window index 1) then
  make new Finder window
 end if
 set {x1, y1, x2, y2} to bounds of window index 1
end tell

tell application "Terminal"
 activate
 
 if (count of windows) is 0 then
  tell application "Terminal" to activate
  tell application "System Events" to tell process "Terminal" to keystroke "t" using command down
 end if
 
 -- For some reason it can take up to 3 times for Terminal to be properly adjusted
 set L to {1, 2, 3}
 repeat with xxx in L
  set {xx1, yy1, xx2, yy2} to bounds of window index 1
  set position of window index 1 to {x1, y1 + {yy2 - yy1}}
  set size of window index 1 to {x2 - x1, y2 - y1}
 end repeat
 
end tell

OS X Finder iTerm applescript window tiling

If you are an OS X developer no doubt you use iTerm. If you haven't set up your unix environment to synchronize between Finder and OS X you should. There are a number of examples but here is the ones I used since I'm a zsh fan:

iTerm Terminal Customization

Now the other thing I wanted was to have a quick-key combination to display both the front finder and iTerm windows and position them nicely tiled. This way I could work in an IDE but have my bare-bones development windows appear in a snap. Here is my applescript code:

tell application "Finder"
 --make new Finder window
 activate
 if not (exists window index 1) then
  make new Finder window
 end if
 set {x1, y1, x2, y2} to bounds of window index 1
end tell

tell application "iTerm"
 activate
 if not (exists window index 1) then
  set myterm to (make new terminal)
  tell myterm
   launch session "Default Session"
   end tell
 end if

 set {xx1, yy1, xx2, yy2} to bounds of window index 1
 set bounds of window index 1 to {x1, y2, x2, y2 + (yy2 - yy1)}
 activate
end tell

Store the script in your home/Library/Scripts folder and from there you can assign a hot-key.

Why don't I just use PathFinder? Well I own it and used it quite a bit but there are things that just make me angry about it that hopefully they'll fix.

1. It is a resource hog
2. It doesn't allow me to simply type a path into an input box (actually almost all OS X Finder clones have this issue).  OS X developers seem to like the mouse and drilling down.
3. The UI can be quite busy and some things that should be simple (finding files in the current directory or below for example are a pain in the butt.

Anyway, now that I'm doing quite a bit of development on my mac I'm using QuickSilver, Finder, and iTerm with applescript to glue them together. Simple.

What inspired me to dump PathFinder? This great podcast that showed how much hidden value is in the limited basic Finder application and how a little knowledge can make it much better suited to your workflow.

Living with the Finder