A plain-text editor for macOS with a focus on a minimalistic user interface, pretty and customizable themes, and useful features.

I enjoy having a small text editor for plain text files. Many editor apps try to do too much, or try to be portable and then sacrifice functionality instead. I decided I wanted to build something simple and targeted to macOS only so that I could use all of the cool features of macOS.

This project was inspired by a previous project of mine, TipTyper, which was also a plain-text editor, but written in Objective-C. That was the project that taught me Cocoa programming. Now that I feel I have an improved level of knowledge of Cocoa, I felt it would be appropriate to re-do that project, but now using the fantastic Swift programming language.

And because some people prefer light text on dark background, others dark text on white backgrounds, some others enjoy sepia tones, and others something completely different, I felt it was important to have a capable theme engine to allow the user to pick whichever colors they want for the entire document interface.

Work in this project is still ongoing, albeit a bit slow.

Mastonaut is a client for Mastodon, the distributed social network with over 2 million users worldwide.

I enjoyed using Mastodon a lot in the past already, but I felt that the experience could be better if I were using it from a desktop app instead of a web browser.

So I started this project back in December 2018, and six months later it made its way to the Mac App Store. Mastonaut has already gathered a significant user base, and I've since updated the app several times to add more features. It is an ongoing project that I work on during my spare time.

It is a Cocoa app written mostly in Swift, with some logic that's bound to strings and attributed strings processing in Objective-C for performance. No third party libraries are used, with the exception of MastodonKit (a library for the Mastodon API) and SVGKit, to render SVGs on the fly.

A lot of technical effort was placed on making Mastodon's custom animated emoji look good in the app, since most other clients (including for iOS) simply display their static versions. This is a whimsical feature that is technically difficult to implement well in Cocoa/AppKit, but I deemed it a worthwhile one, and in the end it looks great.

Graphical user interfaces for package managers already existed for several Linux distros, but I realized there were none for Mac. I decided that making one for Homebrew (a package manager for macOS) would be a good opportunity to learn more about Cocoa development, and I had a lot of fun making it.

After a couple of bloggers mentioned Cakebrew in their work, it showed up on Hacker News, where it aggregated over 300 points. That week the project popularity exploded: several GBs of traffic were observed in its homepage, and it was featured on GitHub trending repositories.

After that, and over time, several other people contributed to the project, and it evolved gracefully for a couple of years. Development stagnated after I started working full-time, and I never had the time to go over it again and do the improvements I want.

Overall it makes available most of the basic features through the UI, and it still works well. Occasionally I still release updates to fix bugs when required.

Many times while at work, or while managing one of my VPS machines, I felt like I wanted to play some specific song from my iTunes library. But because I had my screen covered with several terminal sessions, many times in full-screen, it felt more like breaking my workflow than anything else.

So in a reversal of what I did with Cakebrew, I wrote a command-line tool to control a graphical application. Because ScriptingBridge, a fantastic feature from the heydays of Mac OS X, is still present in macOS, this was as easy as it can be. A simple programming interface is auto-generated, to which you can link and build code that sends and receives information from other applications.

A first version was a simple command line input-output program, with at most a single prompt in case your query produced more than one relevant result. Later I rewrote almost the entire thing to have a prettier text interface, using ncurses.

Now that macOS has Siri, this has become less of a problem, as I can ask Siri to play a specific song for me. However the fun in creating a project in ncurses for the first time made it still worth it.