Hydra 2.1.1¶
401 words on Software
The recent update to man and monkey’s favourite text editor was small number-wise but at least fixed the annoying bottom status bar bug. Finally it can be turned off permanently. Well, at least it seems like that… on the other hand, said bar turned up again when I opened a UTF-16 document. I wonder whether that might be a feature? Because having a UTF-16 document means that the bar actually is remotely useful.
Of course the most prominent examples of UTF-16 files on the Mac are ‘strings’ files which provide localised strings for applications. The most recent one I edited was Hydra’s itself. Using the ‘non-commercial’ version of the app, I found that switching the editor to the background will ‘remind’ you of your cheapskate status after a while by putting a greyed out reminder notice behind the text in your windows. Not too intrusive in comparison to other software but I’m quite easily distracted by things changing on my screen for no good reason (which is also why I mostly have my iChat contact list hidden), so I figured that I could simply remove the offending string from the localised string file.
Actually I started playing around and thought I might give it a ‘seasonal’ touch by replacing said string with the Unicode snowman (☃) and then got carried away using a few of my favourite Unicode glyphs as a replacement text. Anyway, enjoy the screenshot for its background and to see what you need to edit (for your language, of course) to change the string.
And there are many other new things in the application with this version as well. Ranging from improved printing, copying and adding of HTML export to more technical improvements like support for ‘administrator’ editing of files and better AppleScript control. All of those sound good but I never missed them too much. The perhaps geekiest and sweetest addition, though, is that the application now comes with a command line tool that opens files in the graphical editor. I.e. you don’t need to edit your files in vi anymore when working in the command line… Even nicer, the command is actually called see and it supports things like piping in a reasonable way. You can pipe stuff into the application from commands and you can also pipe stuff out of SEE, which will be written to the pipe once the editor window is closed. Nice.
