Welcome to the lab.

I did a little more weekend work on Bunch, and I’ll probably post an update on some exciting new stuff soon. I’d love it if you helped test by downloading the beta version and checking the changelog to see what’s up. Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

As part of working on the new release, I’ve been doing a lot of documentation. And because the documentation has continued to grow, there’s been a lot of reorganizing. And as a result of that, I keep breaking links between pages. So I made a quick tool to make finding broken links easier.

Are you ready? I kinda went down a rabbit hole with Bunch this last week. It’s a lot. Because this release is so big, I’m releasing it as a beta first. All of the documentation for the new version is at brettterpstra.com/bunch-beta/docs, and the download link can be found at brettterpstra.com/bunch-beta/download.

The documentation for everything here is fully updated (and expanded, as part of the aforementioned rabbit hole), and all of the pertinent pages are linked from the changelog. You can just skip there if you like.

First, the blame for this whole development cycle belongs partially to one Jake Bernstein. He had a couple ideas that I thought were pretty clever, and it was a slippery slope from there. Scheduled Bunches and Spotlight searches were mostly his fault. I’m far from blameless in this, but just I want him to share in the responsibility. Well, really I just wanted to give him credit.

Frontmatter

The first big thing is that I’ve introduced frontmatter. It’s YAML-esque formatting that lets you define attributes and variables at the top of your Bunch file. This means additional settings without further complicating the syntax. Just nice, readable keys and values.

---
title: 👍🏻My Cool Bunch
startup: true
---

First benefit: you can use a title key to define a display name that’s different from the filename. Which, of course, means that you can use emojis in your menu titles. A vanity feature, but I really like it.

You can define whether a Bunch launches at startup with the startup key, as an alternative to using startup scripts.

You can also define arbitrary keys and values that can then be referenced as variables in your snippets.

I know what you’re asking yourself at this point. “Did he really stop with just having static data at the top of a file?” No, of course not. Frontmatter can also be dynamically loaded from external files or shell script output.

So that’s nice and all, you say, but is there any real benefit to having frontmatter?

Ok, one more batch of updates for Bunch. It’s just so much fun to work on that I spent last weekend on it. Don’t worry, nvUltra is getting an equal amount of love.

By the way, if you want to keep tabs on all of my latest work, apps, and special discounts, I formally invite you to subscribe to my new email list. It’ll be low-traffic and a great way for me to let you know about the important stuff.

Anyway, Bunch…

Here’s the latest stuff in Bunch 1.3.1!

This is all the result of a combination of new (better) ADHD meds (I refer you to the last couple episodes of Overtired) and the fact that the latest developer seed of Big Sur fixed the blurry PDF issue that I’ve been dedicating an inordinate amount of time to working around, so I suddenly have a little extra time in my day. Thank you Apple. For fixing what you broke, I mean. But still, I’m grateful.

(I’ll do an official announcement post on the Marked bug when this fix makes it into the stable release and is available to everyone.)

So what’s new with Bunch?