Boblet Learned things and Japan diary, by Oli Studholme

Extra Safari Features; HetimaSafariHackEX

By Oli
At 2:30 AM · Monday, 8 September · 2003
To Apple · The ‘Net

I was reading MacPeople Issue 2003.8.15 and came across a great link in the section about Safari. HetimaSafariHackEX adds three great features; a menu containing common Japanese charsets, a bookmark search function, and (very) basic code colouring for Safari’s “View Source”. It does this via an install into your /Library/InputManagers folder, and a new “Hack” menu between Window and Help.

Most Japanese websites don’t declare their charset (probably because most Japanese website creators don’t know what a charset is). Shift-JIS is most common, but if your browser’s default character set isn’t Shift-JIS and the charset isn’t stated, your browser won’t be able to guess the correct encoding. You never know when evil mojibake・文字化け will get you, and a trip into the depths of the view menu is a pain (on a per-page basis). This changes your default character set, although I think it’d be better if it just changed it for all pages from the present site. The menu lists Default, Shift-JIS, euc-jp, iso2022-jp, and utf-8.

The Bookmarks search function brings up a live search box that searches your bookmark titles (including bookmarks from History) for the entered text. It also shows how many bookmarks are selected, and the total number of bookmarks and histories. The only disadvantage is the search is literal - you can’t search for two words unless they’re one after the other (as if you quoted it).

Text colouring only colours comments (<!-- -->), HTML, text and the View Source background. Not a lot of options, but definitely better than the default. You can change the default colours, but they seem ok (red, blue, black and white respectively). You can also change the default font and size via Hack > Preferences.

The website and instructions are all in Japanese, but the Hack menu and Preferences are in English. The present version is 1.1 beta 2. Just quit Safari, copy the HetimaSafariHackEX folder to the /Library/InputManagers folder, and restart Safari.

Nice!