Thanks, that's very good of you to say.

I love trackpads, I haven't used a mouse in such a long time. I do see that a lot of it is down to ergonomics; some friends get cramped hands using trackpads where I get the same thing from a mouse. Plus you can be more precise with a mouse. So I also get why some people have both, but for me, it's trackpads forever. And I was going to say no, I don't use a riser, but maybe I sort-of do. If I'm using the MacBook Pro over Universal Control from my Mac mini, I tend to have it to one side and raised up on books. But that's less from ergonomics, more from how I have too many piles of books on my desk. I have noticed lately that I've been getting neck aches after long sessions on my couch with the MacBook Pro, though.

You are my hero. I keep meaning to do a similar rule and never get around to it.

I do a double renaming. Firstly I prefix the file name with a sequential number, plus the date, e.g. the file name becomes named "070891 invoice to FT 2023 09 22.pdf", and is filed in a sequential folder, and then I rename it again by adding the date at the front of the file name, so it becomes named "2023 09 22 070891 invoice to FT 2023 09 22.pdf", before it is moved to the correct archive folder. All of this is fully automated. (I know I have the date twice, and could remove the second date using Hazel, but I can't see the point.) If you have a document which is a photograph of text, it won't be OCR readable. I run such documents through a little program called "Cisdem PDF Converter OCR" which converts them into an OCR readable pdf.

@clivethompson-jc9my I am ashamed to say that I have sequential numbers for a particular thing too - but I enter them manually. Right. I’m sorting that out.

@@WilliamGallagher for sequential numbers just rename the files with a pattern starting with a hash, [#]. Make sure to edit the number format to the maximum number of digits you will ever need. Mine is set to six digits which allows for one million documents to be numbered. P

Yes. Part of my reasoning for not getting around to updating Hazel was that I have AppleScript and Automator in the Mac already, plus now Shortcuts, and also my beloved Keyboard Maestro. Yet I’m glad I got Hazel back.

I’ve reviewed Highland 2 in the past, before 58keys, so I’ve used it and might remember some answers if you have particular questions. But I don’t know it well enough to do an episode on. I should learn it, then, shouldn’t i? But right now I’m neck deep in Final Draft, both for a couple of scripts I’m writing and for the now increasingly late Three Biscuit Guide to it. I suggest the short answer is to just start writing your script and see what happens: it’s in the using of the app that you’ll figure out what you do and don’t like about it, I think.

@@WilliamGallagher OK, I'll let you and Hazel off this time. I now know more about Fountain and I'll trudge forward as you suggest. It is a Holiday Weekend coming up, which must mean it is Bank Holiday Weekend for you. It is to be raining. I'll start on it. Let's see...it was a dark and stormy nigh...now Highland 2, format that.

That's interesting. I am a little wary of talking about Automator these days as Apple seems to have forgotten about it in favour of the much better Shortcuts. But you're right that it is possible to create a watch folder and have an automation trigger when something is put in it. I don't know how easy it is to get Automator to, for instance, delete anything in a folder that is over 1 day old, but isn't tagged with green or the word "leave". That's what I've got Hazel doing for me at the moment.

Definitely. I think if you've never used Hazel at all then it will take you a little while to figure out, but actually most of that time will be in deciding exactly what you want to happen to these files. For instance, I had a job where by the end of the month I'd have a couple of hundred PNG files that I thought I needed to keep. Originally I got Hazel to look at my image folder and if anything was more than a week old, move it to an archive. More than that, though, when necessary Hazel would automatically create an August 2022 folder, for instance, and then move them into that. After a year of thinking this was very clever, I realised I hadn't once gone back into that archive. So now I just have Hazel delete anything in my image folder that's more than a day or two old.