Bloody PythonLauncher screwed Terminal.app!

I was swearing my head off, scaring my girlfriend while I was at since I usually don't go off the handle that badly, when PythonLauncher screwed Terminal.app. For the non-OS X users out there, PythonLauncher is an application that comes with Python on OS X that lets you double-click a Python script to launch it. Terminal.app is the terminal application in OS X. Since I do most of my coding using a terminal not having it work was VERY frustrating.

For some unknown reason Terminal.app was running the command that PythonLauncher used to execute Python scripts. That was especially painful for me as I use keychain and thus need to enter my password for my SSH 2 key when my shell launches if I do not have an ssh-agent running yet. Having some command get pasted in instead and lock up the shell did not make me happy.

If anyone ever has troubles like this (closest I found was someone sending an email about how pythonlauncher possessed terminal), the solution is to use the Property List Editor that comes with the Apple Developer Tools (/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Property List Editor) to edit the plist for Terminal (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist). If you look you will find an executeString key with a value of what PythonLauncher uses. Delete that key, save the plist, and Terminal.app should then be fixed. Probably best to edit the file with Terminal.app closed.

More fun with building Vim 7.1 on Mac

Got to have more fun with trying to build Vim on OS X last night. I noticed Vim 7.1 was released so I decided to update. That turned out to be a mistake.

Turns out the Aap build file had an "unrecognized item" of build-resource. I don't know Aap but it looked like a target with that name existed so I didn't know what was going on.

At this point I have given up on the Aap building procedure for Vim. So I got the svn checkout for Vim and built using configure/make. Specifically, I went into the src directory and ran ./configure there. To build with Python interpreter support make sure to enable it and to specify the location of your Python config ($prefix/lib/python/config). Then make. If you went with a GUI version then ``make install`` by default installs into /Applications. But if you specified --prefix it will put the Vim.app directory there.

I did replace the icons with the set I mentioned in my last Vim post. If you happen to view the icon for the app before doing the replacement OS X will cache the old icon. Make sure to right-click on the app and choose "View Info", click on the icon in the upper-right, and hit backspace to delete the cached version.