Stop Spotlight From Indexing External Drives

Spotlight in OS X annoyingly indexes external devices like USB pen drives and cameras when mounted. You can block spotlight by using the ‘privacy’ setting in preferences, however once unmonted this seems to get forgotten. To make sure spotlight never indexes a drive you can add a hidden file to the root folder of that device to prevent it getting indexed forever. Create a file called .metadata_never_index

For example to block my camera all I did was :

touch /Volumes/CAMERA/.metadata_never_index

Now if only there was a setting to block all external drives…

Tags: OS X

Getting Text Back From All Caps In Photoshop Elements (Not CAPS LOCK!)

After getting rather confused as to why my text layer in Photoshop Elements 6 would not budge from being in all caps (no not because of CAPS LOCK!) I discovered that to get it back to normal you need to do :

Mac :

Command ('Apple Key') + Shift + Y

Windows :

Ctrl + Shift + Y

This will put the text back to sentence case or lower case (whatever it should be before it was being forced into all caps)

Tags: Macintosh • Photoshop

Windows Text Editors

I’m a Mac user through and through but recently I have been required to use Windows for work. My favourite text editor for Mac is undoubtedly Textwrangler which is a free stripped-down version of Barebones BBEdit. This is a great text editor that does everything I need.

After having such good experiences with Textwranger on OS X my job was finding a Windows alternative. Other than the usual features (syntax highlighting etc) I was looking for:

  1. FTP Support (though I do not use this text editor feature on OS X, this was a requirement for me on Windows)
  2. Powerful multi-file search / replace
  3. Tabbed file editing
  4. Smart indenting- shortcuts to indent / unindent whole blocks of text
  5. Matching brackets

After some searching and testing of various solutions I found Crimson Edit, this is a great text editor that is also free! The only small problem I have had is a few bugs in the FTP connections but this is forgiveable and for me was the best free text editor for Windows. Crimson Edit has been open-sourced because the developer had no time for it any more.

Unfortunately Crimson Edit does not support SFTP connections so I had to look further. In the end I went for EditPlus. This application costs but is fairly cheap (35USD / 30 day trial available) and has a extermely powerful array of features (like Search / replace regular expression support and advanced (S)FTP support with file browser pane). I found out about this editor as it is used by the Magento developers.

Tags: Likes • OS X • Programming

Shortcut To Show / Hide Hidden Files In OS X

Working with OS X is a pleasure for me, but there are some things that really frustrate me, like having no easy way to show/hide hidden files. Whenever I wanted to do this in the past I had to first Google it, then open up terminal and change the Finder config before relaunching Finder:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

But no more! Tim Fletcher has written a small application that can be dragged into your finder toolbar which runs the command. So no more Googling necessary.

See his page here and download it for yourself: http://www.timothyfletcher.com/journal/posts/finder-button-to-showhide-hidden-files-in-os-x

Thanks Tim!

Tags: OS X