Brett Terpstrathemes page - Brett Terpstra

Stained: Simplify Jacket

Brett — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:00:56 +0000

This one was just for fun. I’m sharing it mostly as a starting point for anyone who wants to dig in and make their own theme for Simplify ($2.99 on the Mac App Store), a music controller for Spotify Desktop and iTunes.

If you want to try it out (and you use the Spotify Desktop client and Simplify), just download the file below and unzip it, then double click the Stained.jacket file. It will offer to install it; just click ok and then enable it in the Simplify preferences. There are 4 variations to play with. It has some quirks, but I don’t think it’s bad for an hour’s work.

If you want to hack into it, look in ~/Library/Application Support/Simplify after you install it and dig through the directories there. In one of the oddly named directories, you’ll find the Stained.jacket folder. All of the HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript that comprise the jacket will be in there. If you kill the Simplify app and then launch it from the command line with open -a Simplify.app --args --watch-jackets, it will reload every time you change a file in that directory. Very handy for design/debugging.

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Stained — Simplify Jacket — A grungy polaroid Jacket for Simplify. More Info

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Stained: Simplify Jacket

A few themes for MultiMarkdown Composer

Brett — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing around with some themes for MultiMarkdown Composer, and thought I’d share a few that are turning out half decently. MultiMarkdown Composer’s syntax highlighting uses an extended version of the Peg Markdown Highlight format. You can add themes to ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown Composer/Styles (create it if it doesn’t exist) and they’ll show up in the Appearances preferences of MultiMarkdown Composer.

I wouldn’t call my initial attempts “awesome,” but they should be a good starting point for some ideas of your own. Note that you can add transparency to colors using an 8-digit hex format where the first two digits represent the alpha opacity. Take ‘em for a spin, let me know what you think, and be sure to share any modifications!

Another note… you can use these themes with editors like Mou, too, but you need to remove the extra MultiMarkdown-specific syntax at the end of each theme (tables, footnotes, etc.).

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MultiMarkdown Composer Themes — A few themes for the MultiMarkdown composer editor. Handles a variety of color schemes and adds size differentiation for headlines. More Info

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A few themes for MultiMarkdown Composer

An ode to Twilight, and a TextMate tip

Brett — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:39:24 +0000

A good friend of mine, Christina Warren, just published a piece on Mashable / Dev & Design about TextMate themes, and it warms my heart to know there are other people as dedicated to this aging text editor as I am. She also made her collection available on GitHub, so check that out if you’re in the market for a new look.

Despite the lack of any major TextMate update for years now, it’s still my absolute favorite editor. I’ve tried to let go of it. I played with Coda when it came out, and even tried to port some of my favorite TextMate bundles (without much success), but in the end it turned out that I really like having multiple windows taking advantage of my multi-monitor setup. At least when it comes to Terminal (which, thanks to Visor, is never further away than a double-tap on my control key), FTP programs and my editor. So that was a wash.

Espresso came out a while after, and it was (and is) hands-down the sexiest text editor out there. I still use it whenever I can, but I just haven’t found it to be as extensible and comfortable for me as TextMate. I can make TextMate do anything. Seriously, it made the coffee I’m drinking.

And now, I’d like to pay tribute to one of the original TextMate themes which, in my opinion, is still the greatest theme ever. I’m not alone in this, people espouse its virtues throughout the search engines, it’s been ported to Espresso, Coda, even Notepad++ on Windows, and you can often find online code rendered in its pleasing pallete. I like light on dark themes in general, and I do, on occasion, like to switch to something high-contrast like Succulent or Vibrant Ink. I even like dark brown backgrounds with mellow foregrounds, sometimes. But I always end up back at Twilight, with its slate background and perfectly contrasted colors. It’s detailed and effective in just about every possible syntax, and I find it perfect for readability. I just wish they hadn’t gone and named a tale of girly vampires after it.

I will offer a bit of a tip to try to bring this post around to being… interesting? Did you know that you can actually pull off multiple themes in one? If you look at the screenshot in this post, you’ll see two different color schemes, one for my MultiMarkdown files, and one for my PHP code. It’s a customization of the Twilight theme, with custom colors added for Markdown-specific scopes. In the Preferences, under Fonts & Colors, you’ll note that every color definition has a related scope. You can add new scopes and define colors by pressing the plus button on the left.

You can use a simple TextMate command to find the scope for a particular item. Create a new command in the Bundle Editor, set it to Save Nothing, Input: None, Output: Show as Tool Tip. In the Command field, enter:


echo "$TM_SCOPE" | pbcopy
echo "$TM_SCOPE copied"

Then assign a key equivalent to it and you can just stick your cursor inside whatever you want to know the scope of, and press your key combination. The scope is in your clipboard now, and you can do what you want with it (like add new color definitions). Enjoy!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at An ode to Twilight, and a TextMate tip