Welcome to the lab.

Thanks to Tower for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of Tower for managing my git repositories and workflows, and the latest features are welcome indeed!

Even the best developers make mistakes. And if you are using Git, you know that undoing mistakes often requires a series of complex commands on the command line.

With the release of Tower 4, the popular Git client takes away this complexity by allowing you to use the well-known keyboard shortcut “CMD+Z” in almost any situation. Deleting branches and files, staging changes, rebasing and merging branches, publishing a branch on a remote — all these scenarios can now be undone with a single shortcut. This will not only speed up your workflow, it will give you peace of mind. Mistakes happen. Now they can be fixed just as quickly.

Undo is just one of the many awesome new features that the Tower team has shipped since version 3 came out. From Dark Mode to GPG support, Image Diffing, and User Profiles, Tower is becoming more powerful with each new release.

Learn more about the latest Tower features and take the new version for a spin!

Use code TERPSTRA25 to get 25% off your first year!

And if you are a student or teacher, you even get Tower Pro for free!

Thanks to The Archive for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I know that—with the impending release of nvUltra—it seems like touting the competition, but The Archive is a great app and their support of BrettTerpstra.com means a lot to me. Thank you!

The Archive is a modern note-taking app built to make your notes last a lifetime.

The Archive’s slick and fast interface makes rapid note-taking a breeze, and its native support for Markdown will show your thoughts in colorful plain text glory.

You are always in charge: with our Software Agnostic Design philosophy, we make sure that the app is about your content, and you can do with it whatever you want, whenever you want. We value your freedom very much ❤️. Use other apps if you like, sync via the cloud, or utilize some of Brett’s scripts to manipulate the files. No boxing-in, no proprietary features.

The Archive’s core principles are simple and focused around you and your work:

• Use plain text to store notes, because it’s the one format with the longest lifetime, ever. Any other choice would compromise your notes. The Archive will keep you prepared for an uncertain future.
• The tool is not important, your ideas are. By design, The Archive does not box you in, ever. It’s your content, your insights, your ideas. You shall be the true owner of your notes at any time.
• You are the owner. For us, the importance of your ideas also means you should own the tool. That’s why we sell lifetime access to a long-time supported app, not subscriptions.
• Allow any workflow. Do what you want. You can customize your workflows with your own scripts any time, or just stick to the core for totally unopinionated note-taking. Search, write, collect, create insights. The Archive is there to aid you with that.
• Facilitate knowledge networks. With the flexibility and power of plain text workflows at its core, The Archive enables you to create [[Direct Links]] between notes and organize knowledge using #hashtags: plain text conventions that are well-supported by a lot of tools, including Marked 2!

So there’s no forcing you into any file naming schemes, no directory management shenanigans, no proprietary file formats, no forced cloud synchronization, no locked-away database, no subscription pricing – The Archive will accompany you and your insights in a beautiful writing environment.

By the way, The Archive works extremely well as a tool to implement the Zettelkasten Method: a method to facilitate creating more and more insights through smart note-taking. It’s backed by a community of genuinely helpful and interesting folks where we help each other with our struggle to become better creative knowledge workers.

In this time of obscure pricing schemes, we value transparency. Our open road map tells you about all the features we work on and when.

Check out The Archive today and celebrate its 2nd release date anniversary with the community!

Thanks to PDFpen for supporting BrettTerpstra.com again this week!

PDFpen and PDFpenPro are your ultimate PDF viewing and editing apps for the Mac. You can add headers, footers. You can add watermarks. You can even OCR documents.

With PDFpen, you can edit and search text in documents you scan. Combine multiple documents into a single PDF, or split a PDF into multiple documents. Save elements you commonly use, like graphics or your signature, in PDFpen’s library.

It also includes a precision edit tool, and version 11.2 is available now with table cell content editing.

PDFpen for Mac supports macOS Catalina, and PDFpen for iPad & iPhone is iOS 13-ready.

Learn more about PDFpen and PDFpenPro at smilesoftware.com/pdfpen

Thanks to A Fine Start for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week!

A Fine Start is a browser extension that replaces your new tab page with a minimal list of links that you can group and sort however you like. Get one-click access to your most visited websites and apps every time you open a new tab.

If you have ever thought of a blank new tab as a resting place away from the chaos of the web, then you will love A Fine Start’s minimal and chill aesthetic.

A Fine Start saves your links directly in your browser. You can export/import them into A Fine Start on other browsers and devices. And all of that functionality is free forever.

If you want the convenience of automatic syncing between different browsers and devices, you can get a Premium account for just $5 a month, no password required.

As a disabled developer who relies heavily on a mouse, I originally created A Fine Start for myself—to provide quick access to common sites. Over the years I have found others love it just as much I do. I think you will, too.

Get it for Chrome and Firefox, or use the web version in your favorite browser.