Filed under: TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Regular Expressions for Beginners
Sometimes I think Regular Expressions are like the tax code: if someone professes to know everything about them, they're probably not telling the truth. In reality, Regular Expressions (or RegEx) is a syntax to help you construct very precise search terms to find and replace bits of text in a variety of applications.
In applications like Coda, BBEdit, and TextMate, you can search for a "string" -- meaning just any old collection of letters next to each other -- using a Regular Expression. For example, I could search for the string "laugh" and it would show up in laughter, slaughter, and Laughlin.
While I can't show you everything about Regular Expressions, I can at least start you off. Keep reading for more about how you can integrate Regular Expressions into your workflow.
Continue reading “TUAW Tip: Regular Expressions for Beginners”
If Gmail's UI floats your boat but you prefer using a desktop email client for 'no waiting for a refresh' feel, Ken Mixter has developed a Thunderbird extension just for you. The GmailUI extension brings many of the shortcuts and search expressions of Gmail to Mozilla's Thunderbird client. Keyboard shortcuts like J and K for moving up and down through messages, as well as search expressions such as 'subject:' and 'from:' can now be a part of your Thunderbird experience. Ken even went so far as to include Gmail's 'archive' functionality and (oddly) a quick calculation function, right from within Thunderbird's search box.
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