March 25, 2026
How a missing quote mark may have caused my Mac to act up
In seemingly miraculous fashion, basic functions that I thought were lost to my Mac have returned. Spotlight is now able to find stock Apple apps, and Mail is now able to send emails.
So what happened?
I can only guess, but I do know what I was doing just before the miracle — fixing an error in Terminal, along with cleaning up brew installations.
The error was a missing quote mark in a file, something that has plagued me for years. Before AI, I would copy and paste errors into Google and hope for an answer. Typically I would wind up going down rabbit holes, becoming increasingly frustrated until I finally gave up.
What saved me was Le Chat from Mistral. It showed me how to find the offending file and how to fix it. Out of curiosity, I asked if the the missing quote mark would cause any problems. To my chagrin, it had the potential to create a long list of problems, many of which seemed embarrassingly significant.
But this was a long-standing error, so how would fixing it solve problems that just cropped recently? Again, I can only guess that it was a cumulative thing over the years that finally reared its ugly head.
While I was at it, I upgraded all the stuff that I’ve installed with brew. In some cases, I decided to uninstall — things that take up a lot of space and that I no longer have use for. These included Node, Ruby and Hugo.
Why were these installed in the first place? Because I was curious about static site generators. Fussing around with Terminal is not my idea of a good time, so I eventually moved on. Good old Textpattern can never be replaced.
Recently I learned that Font Awesome has acquired static site generator called Eleventy. They’re rebranding it as Build Awesome.
This is surprising given that Font Awesome’s icons are meant to make life easier for developers. The same goes for Web Awesome, a collection of code components.
I’ll be curious to see how or if they can make a static site generator easy for the average person who has never hear of Terminal, and would be scared to touch it if they had.