Pragmatism in the real world

Always expand the Fantastical editor popover

My preferred calendar app for the Apple ecosystem is Fantastical as I've found that it meets my needs well. One minor irritant is that the editor popover defaults to a collapsed view and I have to expand it to see everything, in particular the notes field which I use frequently. I recently discovered that there's a hidden preference to change this. It's set via a custom url of x-fantastical3://defaults?key=AlwaysShowAll&value=1&type=bool&group=1. Just click this link to set… continue reading.

Global git ignore patterns

One thing that I've found helpful is to add a set of patterns to my global git ignore file (config/git/ignore for me) that allow me to create temporary files that are automatically excluded from git. The patterns I use are these: # Ignore a file by renaming it with ignore its name *.ignore ignore.* *.ignore.* This lets me create a file with a prefix ignore., a postfix of .ignore or add .ignore. somewhere in the… continue reading.

Enabling a focus mode when an app is running on Mac

When I'm on a Zoom or FaceTime call, I want stop all notifications on my Mac so that I'm not distracted by them and would like this automated. It's not easy to tell when a call is happening, so I simplified the problem to stopping all notifications if the Zoom or FaceTime is running as I only run these apps if I'm on call. To do this, I created two Shortcuts to turn the Do… continue reading.