Hacker News Reader

Comment by mekster | Hacker News Reader

There are better tools than a hex editor or system monitor (why do you want to constantly be bothered how well your hardware is performing?).

Unclutter - This gives you a nice non intrusive "memo zone" as well as manage your clipboard, so that copying password won't lose your user name into limbo.

BetterTouchTools - Who'll live without this one? Just give "three fingers swipe down" mapped to cmd-w and your life will be quite that much better. No more click at the upper corner tiny button to close a window which is an insanely dumb usability. Add several more to your likings and your life is even rosier.

And use a password manager, so that a new login made from your phone will be on your mac without effort and nothing gets lost on clean install even if you forget to export them if they're saved in the cloud, not to mention you can have randomized password for every site, but make sure to secure the master password with 2fa.

View on HN

A free alternative to BTT trackpad gestures is jitouch2 (https://www.jitouch.com). It's not as versatile and no longer maintained, but works well for most use cases even in the latest version of MacOS.

Thanks for the recommendation. I paid for BTT, and find it very unstable. More often than not the custom snap windows function just doesn't work. That's the only reason I bought it.

I used to be able to restart BTT and snapping would work again, but that is no longer effective in the latest version. I guess the fact that it even has a "restart" option in its drop-down menu should have been a hint.

Check out Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com) for window snapping. It's open source and I've had no issues with it.

I just don't get why custom gesture mapping isn't implemented in macOS itself.

"custom" violates Apple's UX philosophy.

It's as custom as keyboard mapping which it already has.

It's a list of macOS-only (with one exception) apps that I use with a bias towards lesser-known things. I use 1Password but it's not fully macOS-only and is widely known. I also use BetterTouchTool and it's nice, but the stuff I use all the time is mostly in Hammerspoon. Having a power meter is how I find out when stuff is tanking my battery life, and like I said I use the weather widget a lot. I use Hex Fiend more than lots of other apps since I like implementing binary formats and doing CTF reverse-engineering contests.

> BetterTouchTools - Who'll live without this one? Just give "three fingers swipe down" mapped to cmd-w and your life will be quite that much better. No more click at the upper corner tiny button to close a window which is an insanely dumb usability.

I prefer using the keyboard as much as I can, and I use Cmd+W to close windows (yes, sometimes one may mistakenly hit Cmd+Q and close the entire application, but muscle memory can help).

IMO, applications that don't prompt for confirmation on potentially destructive Quit are broken.

By this definition, all Mac Web browsers are broken, but you can fix the accidental Command-Q problem on an app-by-app basis by remapping Quit to something harder to accidentally type like Command-Shift-Q using the Keyboard pane in System Preferences.

Personally, for applications like my primary browser where intentionally quitting is overwhelmingly the exception rather than the rule, I remap Quit to Control-Command-Option-Shift-Q and rely on the fact that pressing Q while any application is selected in the Command-Tab switcher triggers its Quit command.

> By this definition, all Mac Web browsers are broken

Chrome has a “Confirm before Quitting” toggle-option hiding in its File menu, right above Quit. Kind of wish Safari had the same.

Pretty sure this is Firefox's default behavior with multiple tabs.

Chrome also asks for confirmatiom before destructively closing any tab, even if you don't quit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com