FMBH-299 (From GMDC)

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December 17, 2005

(This post is from my old, old, super old site. My views have changed over the years, hopefully my writing has improved, and there is now more than a handful of folks reading my site. Enjoy.)

Saturday, December 17th, 2005

I'm going to be an irresponsible developer, and throw a bit of code out there that I've been meaning to share for well over a year now but have been focusing on other things obviously. That and there are still some bugs in the code... but hey, why should that stop me, right? This bit of code probably only useful to developers as well, so it's not like a product or anything. Think of it as sample code.

A warning: input managers are bad. They do silly things to your system and most of the time make stuff crash. But they can be so darned useful if you have a really specific need and understand what you are getting into by installing one.

So I've had this input manager, that I use as a little playground for hacks and ideas and such. I call it "FlyOpts". Fly = Flying Meat, Opts = Options. The little hacks come and go, doing bad things to Safari or just making sure an app goes into the debugger if I hit an exception. And there are currently 3 really useful things in FlyOpts that I just dig:

• Edit in BBEdit from any NSTextView (you've probably seen this one before). Best setup by putting "^j" = "flyoptsODBEdit:"; in your DefaultKeyBinding.dict file. That way you can just hit control-j to send it to BBEdit. Source can easily be modified to use SubEthaEdit or TextMate.

• Menu Accelerator- Marrying Search Kit and NSMenuItem in some sort of unholy union. (movie here (play in slow motion), and the ability to call scripts movie here). Sort of like Quicksilver for your menu items.

• And my latest little edition- execute as Lua in any NSTextView (so you can execute Lua scripts right in SubEthaEdit! pic here).

Both a binary and source distributions can be found in /flyopts. If you don't know where to put the binary then... um.. you probably shouldn't be messing with it :)

I should really put this in Michael McCracken's Text Leverage project, and clean it up a bit more. See paragraph one for an explication on why I haven't.

-- posted 7:36 pm