use Perl

I continue to settle in with OSX, and I get more and more amazed at how 'Right' it is. Heck, even Matt, who tried his darnedest to dislike OSX, seems to be coming around.

My own gripes keep getting answered. I bemoaned the lack of an IRC client that worked the way I wanted. One window, each channel full size, switching back and forth with the tabs, only viewing one channel at a time, with the ability to be on two servers at a time. You'd have thought I was asking for the moon.

In the end, I found Snak, which I had looked at before but couldnt get it doing multiple servers. I tried it again with great success. I still prefer xchat, and have it installed, but this way I don't have to run XFree, and I can cut and paste back and forth. I'm sure there's a way to cut and paste back and forth between aqua apps and XFree apps, but I surely haven't found it yet.

Snak being a Carbonized app, i.e. a MacOS9 application with an OSX wrapper, looks largely like an OS9 app and misses out on all the Aqua sexiness, but it's not that bad.

My only remaining gripe, so far, is the Terminal.app. It works just fine in the default Monaco 10pt font. Try any other font or size and you either get absolutely atrocious font smoothing (to the point of being illegible), or you get a font with massively screwed up spacing (Huge gaps between each character).

I have a folder on my dock filled with a bunch of terminal session files. These files, named SOMETHING.term, when clicked, launch Terminal with the settings in that file. I've got one for every machine I have to ssh to, each one with the Execute string set to something like "ssh ct@foo.com". Works like a charm.

I found a shareware terminal called GLTerm that works beautifully. It comes with it's own fonts and uses OpenGL to render them wicked fast. The fonts are incredibly legible all the way up the scale. Unfortunately, it has no concept of a .term file, so I have no way to trigger it with a command, and my SSH folder is useless, leaving me to type ssh by hand. I think I'm going to try and shake some applescript at it.