Today I found that these two commands can do it for iChat for mac:

$ cd /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/
$ mv SmileyTable.plist SmileyTable.plist.bak

Restart iChat. (tip from MacOSXhints.com: Disable graphical smileys in iChat 3.0 but it works for me on Mac OS X 10.5.8 with iChat 4.0.8 (619).

Now my conversations look like this:

Which reminds me that I better soon write a short article on the problem of having the wrong and obtrusive defaults in your applications.

find all files that ends on .js, .html or .ascx:

Then search for lines that contain the following javascript construction

I ended up with this regular expression to match the javascript:

. Although not strictly necessary, i test for word-boundaries around

— it would be sufficient just to use spaces like this

. For grep to eat this its pack with parameters that show filename (-H), line number (-n), only matching part of line (-o), and use Pearl compatible regexps (-P):

Set this into a find expression where the -exec flag allows you to run the grep command on each file found:

Choosing a -regextype for find
The regextype had to be changed and I found that these work with the chosen regexp:
* posix-extended, posix-awk, and posix-egrep
but posix-basic did not work.

• & to &
• < to &lt;
• > to &gt;

That’s it. Basically, I made a copy of one of the more complex snippets and simplified it. Recently, it has been a real time-saver for me despite it’s simplicity.

In text here is the snippet:

Save:

Nothing

Environment:

Cygwin (generic)

Input:

[Selected Text] or [Document]

Output:

Replace Selected Text

Activation:

[Key Equivalent] Ctrl-Shift-6

Scope Selector:

text.html

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# By Jesper Rønn-Jensen, 2007-12-19 (Last update: 2007-12-19)
# escape &,<,> to show in HTML pages
$KCODE = 'U'

$char_to_entity = { }
File.open("#{ENV['TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT']}/entities.txt").read.scan(/^(\d+)\t(.+)$/) do |key, value|
  $char_to_entity[[key.to_i].pack('U')] = value
end

def encode (text)
  text.gsub(/[<>&]/) do |ch|
    ent = $char_to_entity[ch]
    ent ? "&#{ent};" : sprintf("%02X;", ch.unpack("U")[0])
  end
end

print encode(STDIN.read)

The blog software messes up single/double quotes, so here is a link to the raw snippet file which I put in

. On my E-texteditor/Windows install that is

Here it is for you to download:
entities-convert-html-for-html-output.tmCommand
(last update: 2007-01-01)

I was very close to modify it further to wrap selection in <pre></pre> element, (because I always use the code that way). But decided not to: It’s only a keyboard shortcut more to wrap the selection:

Alt-Shift-W: Wrap selection in Open/Close Tag

PS. The editor usually messes up on some of the escaped HTML characters. Please refer to the attached file for the correct version. And please let me know if you find errors in the markup.

Technorati Tags: e-texteditor, textmate, , bundle, snippet, command, convert, html, entities

I’m an eager follower on the E-texteditor forum as it is a good place to follow along and report bugs. This way, the editor can mature as fast as possible and an open forum can help the process of making visible which bugs are the most annoying. Most of the tiny usability improvements, new ideas and bugs are reported and confirmed in the forum.

However, some comments just don’t help the open process. Take this, for instance. A thread in “bug reports” called “Age old bugs STILL NOT FIXED: selection and window size…“:

prencher:

I’ve paid money for this, and I have to deal with these fscking annoying bugs every single time I open the damn editor? Many versions have come out since reported, and they’ve been there since beta.

I honestly don’t care about startup time when I have to resize the window every time I use the editor and can’t properly select stuff when it’s more than what fits in the window (and god forbid you select horizontally outside of the window size..)

Enough is enough. Fix the goddamned bugs.

I could not resist trying to pull a frustrated user in a direction where I felt the discussion would be better, so I added following reply:

jesperrr:

PS. The fact that paying 35$ does not grant license to yell at the developer… At least it’s not anywhere in the license agreement.

Within 15 minutes I was suddenly involved and ranted upon as well:

prencher:

And please don’t tell me what I can and cannot do. It’s hard to be patient when you encounter the same bugs every single day in a paid product, particularly after you’ve gone through the effort of reporting them, only to see a performance release, rather than bugfixes.

There are other threads with a similar tone, for instance “:( Bugs i hate” and “ User prioritized bug fixes and features“. You can read my reply and follow along in the forum. But I think the most important issues here are:

• How do you facilitate an open forum to keep a constructive tone?
• Is there some kind of magic “discussion judo” that could be applied

Related info:

• E-texteditor bug forum: “Age old bugs STILL NOT FIXED: selection and window size…“
• Justaddwater: Powerful Text Editor Released (August 8th)
• Justaddwater: E-Texteditor For Windows (April 28th)

Technorati Tags: e-texteditor, forum, discussion, flame war, discussion judo

I suggest you check out the inspiring screencast and perhaps buy a trial if you like it.

More info:

E-Texteditor website: e-texteditor.com

Justaddwater.dk: E-Texteditor For Windows (April 2007)

Technorati Tags: editor, e-texteditor, etexteditor, texteditor, code, windows, textmate, html, css, javascript, rails, ruby on rails, ruby, rubyonrails, cygwin

Now I stopped looking. E-texteditor for windows is very intuitive and easy to use. I highly recommend watching the screencast (a short tour of some of the best features). Although it’s still in beta, it seems so much better than the alternatives.

I’m using it for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails editing. And it just works.

One note for avoiding future head-scratching: In order to get the keyboard shortcuts (so-called bundles) to work, I had to delete Cygwin and let E install it automatically. Afterwards I had to add packages manually: Subversion (svn)

Other improvements that would be handy:
In HTML mode there is a shortcut “doctype [tab]“, but there is no shortcut for creating the rest of the HTML document. It’s probably easy to add (but i’m not into doing it yet). Besides, I think an addition like this would be a benefit to everybody, so it should be included in the general bundle.

In Ruby files, when looking on Ruby on Rails, it defaults the files to Ruby (because they are and they end in .rb). However, there is a lot of functionality with regards to Rails, so it would actually work better, if .rb defaulted to Ruby. Here is a workaround to add .rb files to Rails syntax.

I also added a bug report “Block selection should work without the mouse” (guess I’m a usability geek).

The simple cheatsheet for E-texteditor at errtheblog is worth checking out, although it contains only the general shortcuts and not the Rails specific ones. Via: RubyInside.

Technorati Tags: editor, e-texteditor, etexteditor, windows, textmate, html, css, javascript, rails, ruby on rails, ruby, rubyonrails, cygwin