Welcome to The Lab.

NiftyMenu is the little tool I use to dump a macOS app’s menu bar into an HTML page so I can search it, click through to items, and add callouts for screencasts and product documentation. The latest round of updates brings the UI in line with macOS Tahoe and cleans up a bunch of behavior and script logic. desktop, documentation, html, macos, menus, niftymenu, screenshot, scripting, webdesign, writing

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In my quest to make Apex as complete as possible before I integrate it into Marked, I’ve added Pandoc-compatible filters, which can be written in Lua for native execution, or in any language using a Pandoc JSON pipeline. apex, filters, lua, markdown, pandoc, ruby

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I’ve been hard at work on a bunch of projects at once, so this is partly just a personal check-in on how things are going. Thanks for being my therapist of sorts. So here’s what’s up with current projects, including Marked 3, Howzit, Apex, and more. Wordpress, apex, bt-downloads, bt-keyboard-shortcuts, developer, features, howzit, markdown, marked, plugins, sleep

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Here’s a new Karabiner-Elements trick that I’ve been using to add home row app switching to my workflow. Tools like LeaderKey are great, but sometimes you just want the App Switcher, and sometimes you just want to be lazy with your fingers. karabiner, keyboard

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Just for fun, I’ve been porting some of my Jekyll plugins to WordPress, and two of them have turned into what I think are really useful plugins. bt-downloads, bt-keyboard-shortcuts, customization, editor, keyboard, plugins, shortcuts, wordpress

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If you use Apex for more than one project, you’ve probably hit the point where a single global setup doesn’t quite cut it. Maybe your book project wants a different plugin set than your docs site, or one repo has stricter defaults than everything else on your machine. apex, markdown, plugins

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Have you ever wished you could turn your local network into a smart routing system? Instead of remembering IP addresses and ports, what if you could use simple, memorable URLs that trigger workflows, redirect to services, or even search your notes? automation, automator, hosting, network, plugins, productivity, ruby, scripting, search, shortcuts

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I’ve been developing a Fish function called . It’s a simple, flexible utility for extracting ranges of lines from files or STDIN input, and it’s flexible enough to handle just about any scenario you can throw at it, from numeric ranges, array style position/length ranges, or even string matching with regex capabilities. command-line, fish, regex, shell, utilities, vim

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My two biggest projects over the last week have been Markdown Fixup and Apex. It seemed worthwhile to integrate the two in some useful way. apex, markdown, md-fixup, plugins

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I’ve updated my Markdown to Sendy script with the ability to use “sliced” images with separate links, the ability to upload assets to a CDN automatically, and a “test email” mode that will actually send a test email to you without going through Sendy. automation, email, html, markdown, mdtosendy, ruby, scripting, sendy

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When Apex reaches 1.0, I’m planning to include it in Marked 3. I realized that Marked has a lot of preprocessing features that were previously handled in Objective-C that would make sense to have in the core processor for both speed and accessibility from the command line. apex, criticmarkup, features, markdown, marked

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I’ve been using my changelog script for years to generate release notes from git commit messages. It’s saved me countless hours and helped me maintain complete, informative changelogs across all my projects. automation, changelog, formatting, git, markdown, rust, scripting, support

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BBEdit has a cool feature called Text Factories for automating repetitive text transformations. When Younghart mentioned it on the forum , it got me thinking. markdown, mdfixup, regex

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