I installed Unsanity Shapeshifter (no link - sour grapes) to try out some themes. Not sure why, theming is a red herring even on Windows, rarely do people create something nicer than the default, what chance do they have of beating Aqua!

There’s actually a longer story here. Vim has giving me some trouble, going into diff mode by default whenever I loaded it. This had been discussed on the Vim-Mac mailing list but no answer found. In an effort to fix it, I compiled version 6.3, just released, but to no avail. So I posted my results to the list and somebody happened to mention that they had found that the problem was caused by the Unsanity’s APE framework. I had installed this at the same time as the Vim problem appeared. Very random (and deeply suspicious) that APE should break Vim.

So I went to uninstall APE, but unless you’ve got one application enhancer installed the APE pref pane just fobs you off with a “Now install enhancers!” message. So I installed ShapeShifter because it was vaguely interesting and I just wanted to install something. Once it was installed I could get to the APE uninstall button. I uninstalled and it fixed Vim. Then I rebooted.

Bad bad bad. When my Mac came back up, half my applications just hung before producing any menus or windows, Mail, iCal and Safari were affected, while others (including, luckily, Internet Explorer) were not. My anger rising, I rebooted again and again. Luckily, OS X must have mended itself, because I’m now back to where I was when I started. Feeling unclean, I actually put myself through all that rigamarole and terror once more in order to completely purge my system of both ShapeShifter and APE.

Bad show Unsanity.