Howto enable syntax-highlighting for Groovy/Grails in Smultron

I recently started playing around with Groovy and Grails. As I usually prefer simple & lightweight text-editors for coding rather  than complex IDEs like eclipse (doing all the ruff stuff like compiling at the command line) I wanted to use it with my favourite text-editor on the Mac: Smultron. Unfortunately the current version of Smultron (3.5.1) does not support Groovy syntax.  Googling around I found out that I’m not the only person that wants to use Smultron for Groovy/Grails, there is even a feature request for it. Peter Borg, the developer said that he will add groovy-syntax-highlighting if someone sends him a syntax definition. Thats fine, but I don’t want to wait for the next version… I want to use it NOOOOW ;)!!!

So again it seems that a woman is needed to do a mans work. I looked around a little bit and found this description on adding custom syntax highlighting for smultron.  Basically its very easy to add a new syntax definition. If you installed the Apple developer tools on your Mac its super-easy as you can use the Property List Editor which can be found at Macintosh HD/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Property List Editor.app. If you don’t have the Developer tools installed it is still possible to create the syntax definition, but you need some XML-knowledge. I will only show the first way so I strongly recommend that install the Property List Editor (as a Developer you should have installed the Mac Development Tools anyway ;)).

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Howto set shell-environment variables on Mac OSX 10.5

From time to time I want to install a command line utility and then I always have the problem how to set the correct environment variables. Ok, googling for the terms “mac osx environment variable set” usually helps. But every time I spent at least an hour playing around, searching like made before I can use my command-line stuff. The funny thing is that this has happened several times in the past and each time I somehow forgot how to define the environment variables ( that’s so me…). But this time things will be different as I write it down in my own blog. So the next time I can google myself and find out about how to do it ;).

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