Introducing `rep` & `ren`: A New Approach to Command-Line Find & Replace, and Renaming
This post is about two new command-line utilities: rep and ren. Both are available on GitHub.
Roben Kleene
Roben Kleene's blog
Latest posts
Adding Custom `man` Pages From Markdown Notes
I recently found out it’s surprisingly easy to add your own man pages from Markdown notes.
The Five-Year Rule of Software Transitions
With software, I’m always trying to pick winners. I mainly care about the big apps 1 : the Photoshops, the Excels, the NLEs , DAWs , IDEs . Software people spend their whole day in, that can take a lifetime to learn, that a career can be built on. I’m interested in picking winners for these apps because they’re powerful and they’re hard to learn. So if I’m going to learn one, I want to be sure I…
Codespaces: GitHub’s Play for a Remote Development Future
When I first saw Codespaces , I immediately wanted it. With ubiquitous high-speed internet, why not offload more work to the cloud? What could our devices look like if most of their power came from the server? What would their battery life be like? Seamlessly leveraging remote resources has always felt like an idea that’s just around the corner, but never arrives. Just having a big beefy machine…
The Era of Visual Studio Code
The most important thing I look for when choosing which tools to use is longevity. Learning software is an investment, and if you have to switch to another application later, you lose some of that investment. In most software categories, choosing the software with longevity is easy, the most popular tools are usually the ones that have been around the longest . Microsoft Excel and Adobe…
Remembering the O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Contest
From 2003 to 2004, O’Reilly Media ran the O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Contest, sponsored by Apple via the Apple Developer Connection (now just Apple Developer). I still think of these winners as some of the high watermarks of app innovation. Many concepts we take for granted today were either introduced, or popularized, by apps on this list. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
macOS Big Sur: Has the Dust Finally Settled on Limiting Third-Party Apps?
Apple’s strategy for years has been to trade desktop power for cross-device feature parity. As expected, macOS Big Sur continues this trend, emphasizing a consistent user interface across devices, and focusing on cross-device development technologies like SwiftUI and Catalyst.
The Enduring Influence of TextMate
TextMate is arguably the most influential text editor ever made. Among the numerous features it popularized are:
On the Mere Suggestion That ARM Macs Might Only Run Sandboxed Apps
Gus Mueller has my favorite take on the news that Apple plans to announce the transition to their own ARM chips at WWDC. Of the various predictions people are throwing around, the only one Mueller gives any credence to is the prospect that ARM Macs will only running sandboxed apps1: Mysterious (former?) AppKit engineer (and fish shell maintainer) ridiculous fish also shares this worry. ︎
Software to Live For
Before I switched to being a full-time developer in 2010, I worked as a user-interface designer for seven years. Something that always bothered me during that time is that so much of what I was learning was just how to use Photoshop really well. After I switched to development, I was hesitant to ever invest that much in just learning a big software package again. “What if I choose wrong? And waste…