Thanks to Anecnote for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! It’s a really cool app for capturing and organizing memories, complete with context. I’ll let the developer explain.
Whatâs strange about memory is how selective it becomes over time. Experiences that once felt vivid compress into rough summaries. Entire stretches of life collapse into a handful of surviving details. A trip becomes…
Thanks to everyone for bearing with me while I get launch bugs worked out of Marked. As a thank you to my readers, beta testers, and supporters, I wanted to offer a few free lifetime licenses for Marked 3.
Marked 3 is the biggest update to Marked in over a decade. From DOCX handling to speed reading, it’s packed with features that are sure to improve your Markdown workflow.
Check out the Marked…
Yay, Furality is here! I don’t know how many people are coming here vs. to my music site since Furality doesn’t give me any dealer’s den click metrics or whatever, but welcome all the same.
I already posted a Furality-specific entry on the blogpuppet, but since this is what I consider my main website, I guess I’ll cover all my bases! So, here’s another little FAQ.
I’m…
Marked 3 has been moving fast since 3.0.6, and is now at 3.0.25 (for Paddle customers). If you haven’t updated in a while, here’s a tour of the highlights.
I’ll give you the stuff that’s genuinely new first, then a roundup of the steady stream of fixes that got it here.
Setapp reviews are only taking about a day on average, but Mac App Store app reviews are taking…
Despite my frequent warnings, a lot of nvALT (and Notational Velocity) users keep their notes in a database instead of individual files. And people are finding themselves unable to launch nvALT, meaning that database with all their notes is inaccessible. So I made a tool to rescue it.
If you ever lived in nvALT or Notational Velocity , your notes might lived in one opaque blob: the…
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanShot X, the absolute, hands-down best app for Mac screenshots. Get one of my all-time favorite apps here.
rhsev/grubber-twin
Yet more command line goodness from Ralf Hülsmann. Sync configuration folders between two Macs from self-documenting Markdown files.
RSSHub
Everything is RSSible
Scraper to turn any website into an RSS feed.…
It’s official, Marked 3 is out! This update represents the largest release of Marked since its inception.
One of Marked’s weakest points in V2 was its poor support for exporting DOCX documents. Marked 3 outputs 100% accurate DOCX files, with element styles, built-in templates, and even converts math equations to Word’s native format. Changes tracked with CriticMarkup are also…
I had switched away from Bartender a while ago, mostly due to quirks on macOS 26, and partly due to confusion over its acquisition. But I’m back, and it’s better than ever.
First, a note about the acquisition: if you got nervous about things that happened immediately after, as far as I can tell it’s all been resolved (and was very quickly). They removed the Amplitude software (that was just…
The Contrib API I published last week for generating GitHub contribution heatmaps as a PNG you can drop into a TerminalWidget, blog post, or slide deck, now goes further than “pick a username and theme.”
First of all, I’ve open sourced the Contrib project on GitHub. Feel free to fork and play with it if you want to. The version on my server will continue to run as a publicly-available API, but…
I just shipped a small API that generates static images of your GitHub contribution graph, and you can try it here. My goal was graphs in TerminalWidget, but I figured it would be useful in more places than that.
I wanted to show an activity graph in TerminalWidget. The easiest path turned out to be pulling contribution data from GitHub GraphQL and rendering the result as…
Callouts just got a lot more flexible in the latest release of Apex. I now support Quarto, Pandoc, Obsidian/Bear, and Python Markdown flavors of callouts.
The original blockquote-style syntax is still first-class:
> [!NOTE] Heads up > This is a note.
That still renders to Apex callout HTML with type-aware classes and optional collapsible behavior…
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanShot X, the absolute, hands-down best app for Mac screenshots. Get one of my all-time favorite apps here.
I’ve been hard at work on TerminalWidget and trying to get Marked through App Review, so I’ve been a bit underwater with blogging. But here’s what I’ve found this week.
TheLustriVA/fontlet
A TUI for figlet written in Go. Super handy…
I’ve been working on a new project called TerminalWidget, and I’m excited to tell you about it. It’s built for people who live on the command line and want useful output visible at a glance instead of buried in a terminal tab.
I gave up trying to find a tool that did what seemed like it should be a simple thing: take things like progress reports, status indicators, and generated images and…
Apex just got a couple of useful fixes, and they came straight out of real-world usage.
I’ve had a few people get worried about my lack of activity, but I’m ok. I dropped my MacBook Pro and broke the screen a couple of weeks ago. It took a week to get it fixed, and then I had a week of catching up on all of my projects, so the blog has been a bit neglected. I’m getting…
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Setapp. Get access to hundreds of Mac and iOS apps for one low monthly subscription fee.
The worst decline of democracy ever recorded could have been far worse.
The institutions that were supposed to be the brakes either surrendered or stumbled over each other. The people put themselves in the gears.
I don’t make this blog very political,…
The keyboard is the most powerful tool we have when using our Macs, which is why I’ve curated what might seem like an overwhelming combination of keyboard utilities that I use daily.
Each of these tools enhances my productivity in unique ways, so whether you’re looking to streamline your workflow or just want to explore some interesting keyboard hacks, I hope the following links and descriptions…
Apex can render Markdown to the terminal (-t terminal or -t terminal256) with ANSI colors and themes. As of 0.1.100, it can also draw images inline when stdout is a real TTY: your  images show up as actual graphics instead of only link-style text.
Apex does not embed a rasterizer. It looks for an external viewer on your PATH, in…
If you write documentation, tutorials, or notes that include keyboard shortcuts, you know how annoying consistency can be. Sometimes you want plain text like Shift-Command-K, sometimes you want nice symbolic output like ⇧⌘K, and sometimes you want HTML keycaps.
This project started as a Jekyll plugin, then became a WordPress plugin, and now I’m offering it as a CLI and Automator Actions you…
Big update for doing: a lot of quality-of-life work since my last post, plus some genuinely useful time-reporting features.
If you want the full docs, start with the wiki.
You can now set time budgets per tag and see how much you have left as you track work.
doing budget dev 100h doing budget meetings 10h doing budget doing budget dev --remove
Totals output now shows…
Thanks to Aptonic and Dropzone for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve been a Dropzone fan for as long as I can remember, and yes, I use it every day. It’s a wonderfully extensible tool that’s always available for things like sharing files, processing images, and opening apps. I’ve also gotten really used to using it’s drop drawer as a way to collect files, and even started incorporating…
The Unite Pro giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce!
Congratulations to:
You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything!
If you didn’t win, sorry, but Unite Pro is still worth checking out. Turn your favorite websites…
I apologize for the delay of these weeknotes! Work has been rather busy lately, I don’t even want to bring it up here very much.
Rest assured I had plenty of free time to do other things I find more enjoyable to share on this blogpost!
This is just a quick note to point out that my port of the linkding browser extension for Chrome and Firefox is now available on both of the respective extension stores.
Hope you find it useful!
Like or share this post on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.
BrettTerpstra.com is supported by readers…
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Fabric, the best way to organize your notes, tasks, and projects in one place.
Tokie
Ok, this is cool. A macOS file manager that turns your folder into a database for better file management, with some very cool integration with your AI agent, built-in Markdown editor, custom fields for file management, and a ton of other capabilities.
A…
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 4 licenses ($39.99 value each) for Unite Pro. Unite has long been my favorite way to create Single Site Browsers (SSBs), sandboxing things like Facebook and MindMeister while adding app-like functionality. The latest version, Unite Pro, is out now, and I have free copies!
From the developer:
We’ve taken everything we’ve learned since 2017 and rethought…
The Surprisingly Powerful One-Page Notebook That’s Always With Me
_There’s a sweet little niche in the stationery world for everyday-carry (EDC) notebooks. Field Notes, Moleskine, Rite in the Rain, Leuchtturm1917, Rhodia, good ol’ Spirax, and so many more. [...] I’ve used (and loved) many of those little cuties, but there’s a new contender for paper notes that’s free of the pressure a…
Here’s a silly idea I had. I don’t like to keep a bunch of icons in my Dock, preferring to use Bunch along with a simple set of persistent Dock apps. I do keep Firefox in the Dock, but I use a bunch of browsers for different purposes, so what if I could access all of them from the Dock without polluting it?
I use Choosy as my default browser. It allows me to pop up a menu or select a default…
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julienXX/terminal-notifier
Send User Notifications on macOS from the command-line. A great shell script companion that doesn’t require making your own calls to osascript.
giladdarshan/gdialog: Display macOS dialogs from terminal and scripts
Another…
I’ve been using Sascha Ißbrücker’s extension for linkding with my own instance for a while now, and while it’s simple and works great, there’s one thing that always frustrated me: the popover window closes the moment you click outside of it, erasing what you’ve entered.
Obviously, this will only be of use to people who:
I’ve been using a combination of Pandoc and other tools to generate the man page for Apex from Markdown. As Apex nears a 1.0 release, I figured it should be able to generate man pages on its own.
Man pages are what gets shown when you run man COMMAND in Terminal. They use roff formatting, which is a pain to write as a human. Writing documentation in Markdown is much easier. Apex can now turn…