I’ve been good over the past few months about stashing all my working documents into a Subversion repository on my MacBook Pro. It’s actually saved my bacon a couple of times, so it was totally worth the initial ramp-up time.

Unfortunately the Apple iWork Apps — Keynote, Pages and Numbers — don’t play well with Subversion. They are really directories, not files, so anytime you save the “file,” it clobbers everything in the directory, including the .svn file. When you try to commit, you get “~” status, which no one likes.

So, this is my brutal workaround:

- Save your initial file where you normally would. Add it, and commit.

Next time you need to work on it, don’t work in that file.

- Copy the file to your Desktop, or a tmp directory, and work in the copied file.

When you are done with your edits and ready to check it in:

- Fire up the shell,
- cd into the whatever.numbers (.pages, .key) directory,
- cp -r * to the whatever.numbers directory of your svn working files.
- Then, you should be able to commit the changes as normal.

Hideous, I know, but it seems to work. Please drop a note or a comment if you have a better way to handle this.

Technorati Tags: Mac, svn, iWork, Pages, Numbers, Keynote

I’ve been using Emacs as my text editor for a little while now, and the keychords have been starting to bother my wrists. So, I went out to find a version of Emacs with proper Mac OSX keybindings (Apple-C for cut, Apple-A for select-all, etc). I found Aquamacs, which is everything I was looking for. Go download it. It will make your Emacs feel like a real Mac application, and the fonts are much more readable.

I’m edging into geekier spaces by customizing my Emacs with lisp extensions. I’m trying to follow the mantra of “automate anything I do more than twice.” I’m not quite there yet, but I’m getting better.

Technorati Tags: Emacs, Mac

One of the many great things about owning a Mac is the fact that it’s built on unix, a rock-solid operating system with generations of open-source tools. Unfortunately, the default OSX installation doesn’t include many of the popular unix tools I wanted.

Luckily, it’s easy to get and manage all the programs not pre-installed. Go to SourceForge and download Fink. Fink gives you a nice graphical interface for downloading all the tools you could want.

The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X (”port” it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution.

Very handy!