A new SDK for Papers is out that allows developers (or anyone) to write search engine plugins for Papers, the excellent journal paper management program that I have mentioned previously. Alas, I know next to nothing about Mac programming, so try as I might to understand the SDK and how to make a plugin that let us search ADS from within Papers, it looks beyond my abilities.
So, maybe someone out there reading this would like to give it a shot?
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The way I make this work is to change the editor defined in the login.cl file from vi to emacs. The cl uses keybindings based on the editor and for whatever reason, changing the editor to emacs does the trick. You have to remove the comment # from the set editor line and then change it to emacs so it then looks like
set editor = emacs
Now, I personally never have IRAF invoke the editor defined in my login.cl file so this change has no effect for me other than making the delete key work. I’m not really sure when the editor is the login.cl file is used. But presumably this change would force you to use emacs when you want vi.
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UPDATES BELOW
So, Daring Fireball dubbed George Ou a “jackass of the week” for this post declaring that Vista’s font rendering puts OS X “to shame.”
Alas, something went awry in Ou’s comparison because he seemed to be showing OS X’s “best for CRT” text smoothing setting. See below the difference between what Ou purports to be OS X’s font rendering and what it actually can be on an LCD.
As has been pointed out, what makes for “good” font rendering is highly subjective, but Ou could have taken the time to actually look in the Appearance preference pane and try some other settings. (I think one has to quit and re-launch a program before the new font smoothing settings take effect.)
Update By default it appears that the Mac is “automatic” which, I would assume for a laptop sets it to “Medium (Best for Flat Panel)”. I’m guessing for some reason “automatic” was producing the “Best for CRT” setting in whatever machine Ou was on – I don’t know why though.
Update II Indeed, the post has been updated as Ou’s comment suggests. I’d argue that font rendering on screen is somewhat a matter of taste. Here’s some more on the differences between Vista and OS X Font rendering. I don’t have access a Vista machine so I can’t add them myself, and Ou’s examples are a different size than mine for some reason (font sizes in browsers no doubt.) You can see all of the renderings now compared at the original post.
Update III There are many other discussions about font rendering especially now that Safari on Windows uses the Mac-style font smoothing.
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The wonderful High performance computing for Mac site has pre-compiled binaries for Grace and the motif library on which it depends. This is perhaps easier than the compile-fest that is required to get it working via Fink on an Intel-based Mac. Of course, for reasons that remain unclear to me, people appear to prefer IDL, SM, and “something else entirely” to grace.
Tags: fink, grace, plotting, unix — .