Nova is here, and it’s every bit as super as you’d expect software from Panic to be.

What is it? It’s a Mac-native text editor for programmers that seems like has been under development forever, but in reality it’s only been something like 14 months since Panic first announced that Nova was the future of Panic text editors, replacing Code Editor, née Coda.

Nova’s got style and it’s got features with style. Local and remote servers, local and remote terminals, git support, hierarchical element support, multi-language syntax and highlighting support, tabs, built-in preview browser with inspector tools, and much, much more.

I’ll be interested to see how Panic does with this in the face of competition from the likes of Visual Studio Code and Atom, which are both very full-featured, support …

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Scott Hanselman is one of the good people in tech, and his YouTube channel is full of great tech topics explained in his clear, instructive fashion. While watching one of his git videos, I noticed his nice Windows terminal prompts that even indicate git status for him when he’s in a repo directory. You can see his terminal setup in his blog post How to make a pretty prompt in Windows Terminal with Powerline, Nerd Fonts, Cascadia Code, WSL, and oh-my-posh.

Obviously the first thing I did upon seeing this was pause the video and go in search of a way to make my Mac terminal do that crazy prompt thing. As I discovered, it’s easy if you use Zsh, which I already do.

Note: All this below assumes you’re already using Zsh as your shell.

You can see for yourself whether you’re using Bash or Zsh with the echo $SHELL command. You’ll …

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If you’re a podcaster who records on a Mac, the odds that you’ve heard of and are using software from Rogue Amoeba as part of your recording process are pretty high.

Rogue Amoeba makes some of the greatest Mac apps ever invented. Vic and I are soundboard junkies, and Farrago is an absolutely amazing soundboard. Using Audio Hijack, we can record our mics, the soundboard, and the group call all on individual tracks. And with Loopback installed, the soundboard isn’t just local, it can be heard by everyone on the podcast by combining it with the microphone as the input source to the call.

Loopback is very cool. It allows you to set up virtual devices and use them as inputs or outputs to other programs. I have a Loopback device called “Shure Beta 87a & Farrago” that I use as my input to Skype and FaceTime calls, and that’s what lets me share my soundboard with my podcast co-hosts. …

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Dan Moren posted a Terminal Message of the Day tip on Six Colors a few days ago, and I decided I would configure my Mac with a MOTD as well. However, I want a random one from a list every time I open a terminal rather than seeing the same one over and over.

The easiest way to do this is to avoid the /etc/motd file altogether and use a script to read a random line out of a text file and display that when you open a terminal window. There are three parts to this, two of which take all the work: a text file full of messages of the day, a script to randomly grab one, and a means by which to execute it automatically when you open terminal.

Find a place on your Mac you want to store scripts, if you don’t already have one. …

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