Quick Python/Developer tips for OSX Lion | Hacker News Reader

Quick Python/Developer tips for OSX Lion

jessenoller.com

96 pointsbellybutton34 comments

I'll add more as they come up or people share them. I'm pretty happy with the upgrade, and nothing broke for me, really. My VMWare Fusion system kept chugging along, etc.

Also, full disk encryption is amazing

Just discovered this The Hard Way, but if you run Boot Camp; make sure you get the Boot Camp 4.0 update on the Windows side before you turn on FileVault. If not; Windows will try to mount your Mac volume (which is now encrypted gibberish), fail miserably, and BSoD every time within 30s of logging in. If it's too late, booting into safe mode and renaming the HFS drivers (AppleMount.sys and AppleHFS.sys IIRC) in C:\Windows\System32\drivers will get your system out of limbo.

Added a note to the OP; thanks.

Since you seem to have hatred for the animation (doesn't bother me, personally. Probably there to draw your eye to the new window more strongly), have you tried "Secrets" before? http://secrets.blacktree.com/ they've got the animation switch in there already. Easier on/off than mucking around in the CLI ("NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled" isn't exactly memorable or fast to type), and you can see the current state of nearly everything in their list.

Added to the op - I knew about secrets, but had long ago forgotten about it.

Since I have your attention temporarily, I figure you should also know about this: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/6732

I had errors when I ran `brew update`. Looks like it might hit most people who have installed it recently, so possibly all new clean-install Lion users (I haven't checked the commit history to see when it might have started, and it could be related to a version of Git anyway).

edit: and thanks for the write-up! I found a few things I didn't know about :)

I've always been doubtful of OSX's crypto. At least with the past versions I was always worrying about side channel attacks.

Merely using encryption on your home folder is obviously going to leak information to unencrypted portions of the disk (not to mention spotlight indexing); but more insidious is default safe sleep (which will write out your encryption key to disk) and DMA enabled ports.

I've never used apple encryption on a disk until Lion - the few times I've tried to use filevault, it has ended in tears, pain and frustration (have you ever run VMware images on filevault? Yeah.)

The implementation in Lion is amazingly good; I do hope they close the DMA port issue though.

Hey Jesse, thanks for this post. Your notes on Python / OSX development have helped me out several times over the past year or so.

1) Install iTerm 2, a better terminal

2) Install Alfred, disable the spotlight hotkey and assign Alfred to Command+Space

3) Install Witch, a better command tab switcher that handles minimized windows.

iTerm2 -> Dislike, it doesn't offer me any benefits to my current workflow.

Alfred -> If you don't have this installed before upgrading to Lion, which the article is about, then I think you might have something wrong with you :)

Witch -> Never used it.

I wrote an alternative, MacTerm (http://macterm.net). I think it has some advantages over the iTerms or Apple's Terminal.

I'm wondering what's your screen resolution? I'm using it on 1920x1080 + 1600x1440 dual screen. To me, the ability of iTerm2 to vertically and horizontally split multiple terminals fullscreen on a big monitor is a huge plus.

And for a lone time, Terminal.app before Lion only supports 16 colors, which is a big reason for me to switch to someone better. iTerm2 fits the bill.

I don't like splitting terminal windows - I use the tabs built into terminal.app and sizeup (http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/) to split/stack essentially "tab groups". I normally have multiple spaces, each with 50% of the horizontal screen dedicated to vim, and the other 50% to two groups of terminals (each one taking 50% of the vertical).

I'm not running dual screen - just 1900x1200 and 1440x900 depending on where I am. Like I said, it's a workflow thing. I didn't even notice the increase in terminal colors - all my good coloring is in mac vim, not in the terminal.

The autocomplete and "instant replay" features are also very handy to have when you need them (from iTerm2).

I've actually just switched to iTerm2, for one reason in particular (because Terminal.app is indeed pretty good): it launches faster. Noticeably so, at times. Even on a clean install, Terminal occasionally takes a couple seconds to appear and get into my default directory. iTerm2 so far has never taken more than a second, and usually far less.

I have Alfred assigned to Option+Space, since I actually use Spotlight for things (though not launching applications).

The author states Lion’s default Python install is a healthy Python 2.7.1.

I have personally had an unreasonable amount of trouble installing and using Python libraries and environments on Snow Leopard. I think right now I have at least 3 different versions of Python installed, each with various and disparate libraries. Has this been addressed in Lion? Getting Numpy, Scipy, etc to work is a chore; especially when comparing it to the Linux experience.

I used to have trouble getting numpy and scipy installed - until I started using homebrew. It blows MacPorts out of the water. Just make sure your architecture is set correctly as Jesse outlines in this blog post, otherwise you'll run into problems building the various C components with gcc.

What he said; use homebrew - judicious use of homebrew and virtualenv will save you lots of pain. I never install framework builds from python.org - I don't like installing things into /Library or ~/Library

Haven't upgraded to OSX Lion and probably won't purchase MacBook anymore in the future (I currently own a 13" MBP).

Setting up development environment in Linux seems more sane not just for Python but for almost everything else (Java, Ruby, typical LAMP stack) except if you're doing iOS development.

I only do Linux/web development; and it never really bothered me. Of course, I'm doing Python development, which means I rarely run into issues (and if I do, homebrew fixes them easily). I also run VMware fusion with Ubuntu/Fedora VMs for deployment testing. And throw in about 4 windows VMs for IE/compat testing to boot.

So, I disagree that it's "more sane" - I spend plenty of time chasing down crazy outdated versions of Python libraries the apt/yum repos contain, etc, and well, I don't like spending my time in linux window managers (I dislike the UI) so it's a wash, and getting a linux dev environment setup on my mac is as simple as booting a VM and swapping it into fullscreen.

But to each their own. If I wasn't running OSX, I'd be running Linux. I just prefer one OS' aesthetics over another.

See also Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) - runs off of virtualbox if VMWare isn't your thing.

At some point in time in my life (I don't know when), I started to ignore the UI of various OSes. Most of my time I spent in an IDE, browsers, and occasionally a communication software (Outlook, LotusNotes, e-mail client, whichever floats).

On the other hand, I thought people install Python libraries either directly downloading the distributions or via easy_install? I never install modules from apt/yum.

shrug - Like I said, it's a matter of aesthetics and usability for me. I've never met a Linux UI I liked (except for XFCE a long time ago), and I go out of my way not to use non-native apps on OSX. It's all about personal preference. I also dabble in design and UI/UX, and have for some time, maybe that's why.

ps. easy_install is bad for you, use pip! http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/index.html

It depends on the communities. For web developers, which depend on few compiled dependencies, this works well. For some other communities, like scipy community, not so much. Incidentally, mac os x is the worst platform to support ATM in that aspect, because of incompatibilities between OS X versions, python versions (mac os x vs python.org, all ABI incompatible), etc... Even windows is easier to handle at this point.

I sort of agree with you, at least in the past. I used to run Linux as dual boot on my MacBooks and any Windows laptops. However, life became simpler for me (a good thing!) when I just started running OS X and switched from leased servers to EC2s. I mostly code in Clojure, Java, and Ruby so it really doesn't matter much which OS is on my laptop.

There are 2 problems with Java and OSX for me (none of them are huge issues probably)

1) OSX version vs public version 2) Java SE API source code (you have to do some tinkering before you can browse the source code of JDK classes using your favourite short-cut keys provided by your favourite IDE).

Huh. He said "need done" instead of "need to be done". I wonder if he's originally from Pittsburgh?

Alaska, actually. Where did I say that in the article?

Oh, this is embarassing - I thought I was commenting on the Android/iOS article.

Has anyone had any success using the osx-gcc-installer he mentions? I'm really curious how well it works in comparison to Xcode.

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

By the way, does anyone know how painful is it to get Mysql working for Python apps. Installing MysqlDB on Python was painfully excruciating process on Snow Leopard.

I've had good results with the pure Python "MySQL Connector": https://launchpad.net/myconnpy

For emacs: change the system-wide keyboard shortcuts for mission control (Ctrl-up and Ctrl-down have better uses).

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