Cascadia Font for macOS Terminal

tools, , ,

While I have written about my thoughts about montype fonts some time ago, I was still looking for some nice font to be used within Visual Studio Code as well as Terminal (macOS as well as Windows Terminal). Said that, Microsoft just released a new font (actually they open-sourced it). called Cascadia Font at GitHub.

Once installed you still have to enable it in Visual Studio Code as written by Kayla Cinnamon.

And yes, it works like a charm once enabled.

Besides this, I am using iTerm2 on macOS, and it is also possible to enable this font including font ligatures for your Terminal sessions.

Thanks to Daniel pointing me to this gem, I would have missed it otherwise!

Easy File Menu for macOS

tools, ,

There is one step working with macOS driving me mad: to create a new document you either have to do it manually in the terminal or from within an application such as Microsoft Excel. However, to create documents not withing the application was one of the features being introduced with the Xerox Star in the 1980s. This was a fundamental change for workflows moving away from application-centric towards document-centric thinking of workflows. Actually, this is one of the few features I do really like on Windows – likewise, I miss it on macOS.

New File Menu from the app store fixes this issue in macOS. There are various tools out there as well as many guidelines on how to fiddle with you macOS to get this done. But this is a very simple and quite cheap out-of-the-box solution.

After using the free version for a while, supporting only one kind of files, I finally bought the full version. You can add additional file types by providing your own templates and tweak some of the settings.

App Store Link: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/new-file-menu/id1064959555?l=en&mt=12

Glow Effect for SynthWave’84 on macOS

hacks, ,

During today’s recording of our podcast, I talked about not getting the glow effect for the SynthWave’84 theme working. Right after doing so, I figured out how to solve the issue.

After installing the plugin, you need also the extension Custom CSS and JS Loader.

Now edit the settings in the settings.json file of Visual Studio Code by adding the following entries:

"vscode_custom_css.policy": true,
"vscode_custom_css.imports": [
 "file:///Users/andreas/.vscode/extensions/robbowen.synthwave-vscode-0.0.7/synthwave84.css" 
],

Of course, you have to change the user name above to yours. The settings.json should now look quite similar to the following:

Eventually, you need to make sure Visual Studio can apply the modifications by running 

>sudo chown -R $(whoami) "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron"

That is, by the way, the step I have missed in my previous attempts.

Now you can restart Visual Studio Code, enter Command+Shift+P and enter Enable Custom CSS and JS

Once Visual Studio Code is reloaded, the glow effect of the theme should work like a charm.

If you receive any message about a corrupt Code installation, you might want to simply click it away.

Some of the previous steps might need to be repeated once the Visual Studio Code installation was updated to a new version.

Theme: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen.synthwave-vscode

Custom CSS Loader: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=be5invis.vscode-custom-css

Customize Windows 10 File Type Icons

tools, ,

I just realized, that recent Windows version make it very hard to customize some aspects of your desktop.

As I am using Sumatra PDF as my default PDF viewer, I do not have the typical Adobe icon on my desktop. While having these icons on my Mac as well as on my work PC, this is rather confusing.

I came along File Types Manager which actually takes away the registry fiddling.

File Tymes Manager Main Window

It works with Windows XP, 7/8 and Windows 10. if you have any .ico files available it is pretty easy to change an icon for a particular file type just by assigning it.

Changed PDF file type icon

Also there are tons of other features, I haven’t used yet.

tl;dr

If you want to change file type icons on a Windows 10 system, you ca use File Type Manager to do so easily.