X11 2.3.1 addresses X11 issues in Mac OS X 10.5.5.

In general, keep your X11 updates around after installing them because you need to re-install it if you install OS or security updates through Apple’s Software Update.

I just got the beta release of Versions, a Subversion front end for the Mac. I use the command line interface for Subversion for most of day-to-day work, but occasionally I like a visual interface to do comparisons, show timelines, etc. The Subclipse plugin for the Workbench works fairly well for this, but I don’t always have the Workbench running and it’s slow to start. Versions provides a very Mac-like experience to version control.

I didn’t see any mention of the price; I’m hoping they intend to make their money selling Subversion hosting at Beanstalk.

There’s an XQuartz update. Remember to keep the package around to re-install after doing updates from Software Update.

XQuartz has an update for X11 on Mac. Remember to re-install this package after further updates to Mac OS X.

UPDATE: it’s been updated to 2.2.0.1 already.

1. [shell-fu]$ lists handy, or just plain cool, Unix shell commands. You can learn some shell scripting through the great examples on this site.
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3. Terminal tip to have all links open in tabs of a single Safari 3.1 window. This is one of the reasons I switched from Safari back to Firefox recently (the other being that the Firefox 3 betas have fixed the issues I was having with Firefox).

The XQuartz project released the 2.1.4 X11 update (requires Mac OS X 10.5.2).

Continue reading “X11 2.1.4 for Mac OS X 10.5.2.”

The diff UNIX utility has been a great tool for me. It performs a task I need to do regularly, find the differences between two files. Unfortunately, despite using it regularly, I am still routinely puzzled by its output. To the rescue: a tool I already had installed, but didn’t know about.

FileMerge.app is an application bundled with Xcode that can be invoked at the command line to display differences between files (or directories!):

$ opendiff path1 path2

This opens a very intuitive GUI to display the differences. (Wow! And I thought piping diff‘s output to TextMate to use its diff mode was an improvement…)

You can even hook it into Subversion. By the way, the IDL Workbench has a similar tool built into it.

The X.org Wiki has a page for updates for XDarwin. I was still having some issues (with CURSOR) that these updates fixed. The two lines that will do the updates are:

curl -LO \

http://people.freedesktop.org/~jeremyhu/x11-apple/x11_update.sh

sudo sh x11_update.sh

UPDATE: it appears you should get your updates here now. I still have X problems, but things are definitely improving.

This is just one more piece of the X11.app puzzle in Leopard. Because /etc/X11 is gone in Leopard, the old way of configuring X11.app is obsolete. The new way is org.x.X11_launcher.plist. So the following,

defaults write org.x.X11_launcher app_to_run /usr/X11/bin/xlsclients

is the way to configure X11.app to not start an xterm every time it starts.

UPDATE: changed from xhost to xlsclients on the recommendation of this useful page (see the second page).

Quick Look is a handy feature of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. It allows you to view the contents of a file without actually opening it. I’ve found it extremely useful for browsing files.

Of course, out of the box, Leopard doesn’t understand IDL .pro files because ITT VIS doesn’t provide a real application for IDL (the .app files in the IDL distribution are just executable files, not directories in the form expected). Normally, an application provides a listing of associated file types and information about them in a .plist file inside its .app directory. Here is my attempt to provide a “fake” application that doesn’t do anything except associate .pro files with the plain text file type. To install, simply open the disk image and place the “FakeIDL.app” in /Applications somewhere.

Also, in a related item, it’s possible to use Quick Look from the command line (although I generally use it from the Finder). The command is fairly simple, but generates a lot of messages. Here’s a simple script that cuts the clutter it. Put it in your path and call it like:

ql *.pdf

UPDATE: IDL 7.0 seems to have broken my FakeIDL.app. I’ll see if I can fix it.