This is the sound of time rushing by while I juggled too many balls (dropped a few) and tore my hair out over computer mysteries.

I’m not going to try to be very structured; I’m not in the mood and it would take me too long.

Five Things: 4 text editors I have at this moment installed on Ariadne the MBP, and another I will soon install.

– TextEdit
– TextMate
– TextWrangler
– SublimeText 2
– Mou (“the missing Markdown editor for web developers”)

I installed Multimarkdown yesterday, and then the MMD bundle for TextMate, and then I spent an hour NOT UNDERSTANDING why it wasn’t working. After a while Math came to hold my hand on AIM, and it turned out I was making my test with a command that is in the doc but not in the soft, so it was unsurprisingly not working. ANASMASH. (hey TextMate dudes: don’t publish faulty documentation. BAD DOCS ARE WORSE THAN NO DOCS)

So I’m slowly learning to use MMD (she says, while writing a post in the WordPress interface without using MMD shorthand at all…). This is a goal of mine.

TextMate, now, yes, it seems SUPER CLEVER and very, um, handy? Or, say, potentially handy? But also… probably too much for me. I’m not a coder, after all, and I’m still not sure I grok how it works, and soon my trial will expire… I just don’t know how much of myself I want to put into that learning curve.

So I think I’m going to focus on MMD (here’s a special episode of the MacPowerUsers podcast about it), try to use Mou and see if I like it, and of course, eventually (next paycheck, whenever that is) the amaaaaazing-love-it-forever Scrivener.

Other links (stuff I haven’t tried yet):

– how to make your Library folder visible (it’s hidden by default in Lion, grrrr)
– iTerm 2, a terminal emulator / replacement for iTerm
– Forklift, a file manager, FTP client and more
– PathFinder 5, a file manager / Finder replacement

– not a Mac thing but an iPhone/iTouch app: a better (I heard) calendar, WeekCalendar.

I still haven’t installed any sort of launcher (Launcher, Quicksilver) but I’m also not using Spotlight to launch apps – haven’t gotten started using Spotlight, honestly. I click and use the Launchpad, which I’m only now starting to find irritatingly long/unefficient. I also still haven’t solved the iTunes question, nor the backup problem.