Tech

The Archive Custom Theme: iA Writer

The Archive is an outstanding piece of software for personal knowledge management, especially of the kind I spoke about in my last post. Among its strengths1 is its custom theme engine, allowing users who are willing to tweak a few .json files to create new color schemes from scratch. Since I love iA Writer‘s design, I thought: why not make The Archive look like Writer? So that’s what I did, and you can download the results.

To download the themes, right-click on the themes you want below and save the files in a place you’ll remember. Then, open The Archive’s preferences and go to the Theme tab. Click on “Open Theme Manager” then “Open Theme Directory.” Move the files you downloaded there.

Dark Theme — Light Theme

I tried to stick as closely as possible to Writer’s color palette, in both its light and dark mode. I highly recommend using one the same fonts Writer uses, which they graciously release for free to the public.

Changelog

  • 1.0: Initial release
  • Dark 1.1: Fixed the unfocused background selection color. Huge thanks to reader Sebastian for the heads-up!

Notes

Learning Regular Expressions

Some other blogs I follow have recently been writing about the beauty and utility of regular expressions. I love regular expressions. Spending a couple of minutes learning them is a great investment, as the time you’ll save later will be many orders of magnitude larger than that. It just makes sense from so many perspectives. You don’t even have to be a programmer to benefit from them, as shown here. They just make you a better computer user.

While the posts do mention some incredibly solid sources to learn regexes from, such as the BBEdit User Manual, they still may be a little too daunting for the “rest of us.” That, for me, is where RegexOne comes into play, which no one has (as far as I can see) mentioned so far.

The whole website is, essentially, one smooth tutorial which will teach you regexes from the bottom up, easing you in one bit at a time, without ever overwhelming you. It’s well-paced, highly interactive, and exactly the sort of thing I’d take on as a little weekend project. I’ve used it to learn regexes back in the day and occasionally come back to it from time to time. It’s great.

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