Thursday, August 07, 2003


Hydra 1.1.1


I don’t know how I missed this, but the Coding Monkeys apparently shipped Hydra 1.1.1 about two weeks ago. This is a huge deal for me, because Hydra’s my current favorite text editor, and I live in my text editor. The big new feature is an option which uses Webkit to give you the option of seeing a live HTML preview (145kb PNG). I love this feature — it’s especially useful for these blog posts (Blosxom doesn’t have a draft-mode) — it should save me a lot of after-post typo repairs and formatting tweaks, and should entirely spare me (and you) the bane of every hand-coder’s existence — unclosed tags.

Of course, all the other wonderful stuff that makes Hydra such a joy is still there:

  • Collabrorative editing (on the local network via Rendezvous and on the Internet and intranet via the “Join via Internet…” command): just a few weeks ago, I helped a friend get his mail server configuration files sorted, using this feature and iChat AV, and it’s wonderful.
  • Though it doesn’t have BBEdit’s plugins, I’ve found the combination of the OS X Services menu, in conjunction with Mike Ferris’ TextExtras, and Riccardo Ettore’s TypeIt4Me give me something that’s at least as powerful, and much more flexible. (As an example, TextExtras powerful pipe command means that you can process text in Hydra’s editing window with any command or script installed on your system, including traditional Unix tools like sed, awk, etc., plus any script you might care to write [or download ;)] in Perl, Ruby, Java, Python, C, sh, or AppleScript. It’s like having a small, friendly Emacs, without the evil.
  • the little stuff — flexible syntax coloring, fast startup, and did I mention the retail price? Free. I realize (and respect) that a lot of folks are married to BBEdit ($179) for various reasons, but if you’re paying for TextWrangler ($49) without at least checking into Hydra, I think you’re nuts.
Anyway, with the new preview feature, what was already a really good app becomes a killer app. Kudos.

(thanks to Kimbro Staken for the pointer)


:: Dave Walker 14:45 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags:

:: Comments (4)

Comments:

Citizen Keith wrote:

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Hydra + Blosxom = Happiness
ssp wrote:

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Have you found a way of changing the font in the HTML preview yet (some kind of UserDefault perhaps?) I've grown to quite dislike Times over the years and try to keep my screen free of it. P.S. You have to get that layering on this page right. I can't read the rightmost bits of my lines.
d.w. wrote:

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Sven -- I'm not 100% happy with the layer sorting (overlapping text, ew), but I think it should be working well enough now to be usable. So far I haven't seen anything about how to customize Hydra's preview window, but I'll keep my eyes open.
adara michaels wrote:

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Sounds like a very good suggestion. I will add one within the next week.



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