Collin.blog
Collin.blog
Collin Donnell – Freelance software developer from Portland, Oregon.
Freelance software developer from Portland, Oregon.
Freelance software developer from Portland, Oregon.
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Here’s a simple function I wrote for the fish shell to show the current git branch name in the titlebar, along with an asterisk if there are any local changes.
8.3.2025 01:55Git Branch in Terminal Titlebar With FishListen — it’s not that I don’t want to use Vim keybindings. I’ve done it before. They’re fun. It’s kind of like giving your text editor a manual transmission. The reason I’m not using them now is because I don’t want one way of working with text on my computer which works with my editor, […]
7.3.2025 22:31Emacs Style Keybindings on macOSI wrote myself this small template as a starting place for when I’m writing shell scripts. I just wanted something basic with enough structure to remind me how I like to do things. I thought maybe it would be helpful for other people who don’t write shell scripts too often but want to them to […]
3.3.2025 04:24Shell Script TemplateEvery new editor makes it harder to write extensions for than the last. TextMate used any shell script that could handle stdin/out. BBEdit can also do a lot with shell scripts and has great AppleScript support if you want more integration. Visual Studio Code wants me to create an entire project in TypeScript. Nova is […]
3.3.2025 00:46Scripting Editors Keeps Getting HarderI know it’s not safe and goes against the whole ethos of Swift, but after having worked a lot in Ruby, being able to generate methods at runtime is a killer feature, and I miss it dearly. Swift is all about safety and static analysis, and those are totally valid goals for a language to […]
23.2.2025 00:28Something I Miss When Coding SwiftI wrote a post on my photo blog about incident versus reflective metering in photography. I thought it could be interesting to people who follow me here. If you’re only using the meter in your camera or a shoe-mounted meter, you’re using a reflective meter. The post goes into detail about why reflective metering is […]
11.12.2024 02:55Reflections on Incident MeteringFor the past eight years, maybe longer, I’ve had this idea I think a lot of people shared. That idea was that Trump supporters or Fox News conservatives, or whoever, were being duped. They were voting for and believing the things they did because they were being lied to and had bad information. I’ve heard […]
4.12.2024 03:30Stop Infantilizing Trump SupportersI just updated my Bluesky handle to @collin.social. It took roughly ninety seconds to complete, and I can still use the actual domain for other things. When I had looked at doing the same on Mastodon, it involved configuring a WebFinder route that returns JSON, and once I did, it wouldn’t actually change my handle […]
26.11.2024 23:12Updating My Bluesky Handle Was Surprisingly EasyOf the Apple Intelligence writing tools that were released in beta recently, I’ve found the ones which try to rewrite your text in any way to be pretty bad, at least for me. The one feature I’ve been using many times a day, however, is “Proofread.” It’s sort of between macOS grammar/spellcheck and Grammarly. It’ll […]
21.11.2024 02:36Keyboard Shortcut for Proofread on macOSOn macOS, Apple has the concept of a “Smart Folder” that is found in all kinds of places. Sometimes they’re called something else, but it’s the same concept. Just off the top of my head, they exist in Mail, Contacts, Finder, Music, and Photos. The only apps I know about that have added them for […]
20.11.2024 00:17Why Can’t iOS Have Smart Folders?Yesterday, I took the Threads app off my phone. I’d started to think that maybe three different apps for text-based social media (Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky) were too many, but really, it’s just that Threads kind of sucks, and I was tired of wasting my time on it. Here’s how I’d classify the three as […]
19.11.2024 02:57Took Threads Off My PhoneI’m not going to say that I’m proud to have spent the amount that a .blog domain costs, but I did, and I’ve moved my primary blog to it. Everything, including the RSS feed and old post URLs should just work. I don’t know how else to put it but that my other sites were […]
19.11.2024 02:28Collin Dot EverythingSince the world of text-based social media seems to be having another shakeup, I felt like this would be a good time to let people know where to find me across all of the places. As of now, I’m using all of these, so follow me on whichever you like. Here, obviously (RSS, mailing list) […]
17.11.2024 02:17Where to Follow Me (Mastodon, Bluesky, etc)Joe Steel wrote a post about how he uses different monospaced fonts for different apps. I feel boring now since I just use SF Mono for everything (the default in recent macOS).
24.10.2024 20:46My Boring Coding Font AnswerIn the last few months I’ve started getting really into film photography. If you want to check that out I started a new photo blog at collin.photo. I’m going to be posting photos as I get them developed and writing about where I was or what I was thinking. So far I’ve mostly been taking […]
5.10.2024 21:50New Photo BlogJoel and I were lucky enough to be joined by Ethan Marcotte to talk about his new book, You Deserve a Tech Union. It’s a fantastic book which I read in it’s entirety before getting to interview Ethan on the show. After the last year and the horrific treatment many full-time and contract tech workers […]
12.9.2023 19:28Tech Unions with Ethan Marcotte on the Rooftop Ruby PodcastDash, a documentation viewer for macOS, just released version 7. I’ve been using Dash for at least nine years, and can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t. What Dash does is let you have all of your documentation offline and with full text search. If you’re familiar with the Xcode documentation window, it’s like a better version […]
18.8.2023 22:59Dash 7 ReleasedIf you use macOS, go put this into your zshrc or equivalent. Once you’ve done that, use it by typing things like xman grep to show man pages in their own window like this: Terminal man page window On macOS, Terminal.app handles the x-man-page URL scheme by opening a new window showing the man page […]
18.7.2023 20:27Better Man Page ViewingIn 2018 I bought a Peloton bike. Since then, I think I’ve ridden it about 100 times. Always in fits and starts, too. I’ll ride it consistently for a few weeks here and there, then get sick or distracted and stop doing it. Based on that, I would say this has not been the investment […]
18.7.2023 00:04Exercise is hard, I hate it, and I have to do itI really wanted to write something today, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’ve been feeling pretty anxious, which only got worse when I got a cold earlier this week. At this point, I can barely form any coherent thoughts. That’s why I’m not going to write anything. Speaking about the anxiety thing […]
2.7.2023 02:22Not Writing Today