Comment by ysleepy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ysleepy | Hacker News Reader

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My recommendations for Mac Users:

* Put the Dock left or right, vertical space is precious (trust me, do it for a week and then decide)

* Setup Hot-Corners (Settings -> Mission Control -> Hot Corners)

   - Upper-Right Corner as Mission Control (Must be upper right so spaces are immediately shown)

   - Lower-Left Corner as Application Windows

   - just fling your mouse curser into the corner (use std. gestures on the trackpad)

This makes window management a lot better.

* Maximise Windows by double clicking the Window title bar.

* Disable auto-{correction, capitalize, etc}, smart-quotes under Keyboard settings (if you want)

* Learn about the screenshot shortcuts CMD+shift+{3,4}, 3: full screen, 4: select area or switch to window select with hitting space bar once.

* Learn about CMD+space for launching apps

* Set Key-Repeat to fast and shorten the delay

* Disable spotlight for everything except what you want to use it for.

* Enable File-Vault

* Disable "Wake for Network Access" under Energy

* Enable the ssh server under Sharing "Remote Login" (If you want)

* Disable the visual/audible bell in the Terminal profile.

* Install MacPorts/Homebew

And one thing to internalize is that Apple is a little authoritarian about some UX aspects.

For example the snapping and window thing... Apple has a thing with continuos freedom opposed to the discretisation one is used to. I've come around to that view as well actually, free your mind, nature is not a stepped slider.

Cool Utilities:

MenuMeters with a CPU usage graph. this allows you to see if something is killing your battery.

MonitorControl (on github) to set brightness of external monitors.

LittleSnitch ($$) for fellow paranoid control freaks

IINA (github) best video player

UTM for VMs (free on github) paid options are good too

MacPass for KeePass databases

Hope it helps.

> Disable spotlight for everything except what you want to use it for

My friend's mac would "take off" (fan spun up crazy fast) after every boot/login and I disabled full-text search of documents to fix it. There was probably a weird, maybe not-to-spec pdf/docx on the filesystem that spotlight couldn't parse and got stuck. Kinda dumb that it would waste a 100% usage on one CPU core for a couple minutes every boot though.

It's really abysmal. I had a similar situation: every time I'd pull a monorepo, my machine would be flooded with "mdworker" processes. The CPU would spin up and the machine would operate at 85c for a few hours before finally cooling down. The culprit was Spotlight, and the solution was to disable search indexing.

Spotlight is a really good search tool, and it's worth occasionally letting it build its index. You mostly only notice this when you've changes a whole bunch of files or setup the computer for the first time. It really is short-term pain for long-term gain, because Spotlight is phenomenal at finding anything on the Mac in a really short amount of time.

That being said, if you're in the dev-space, I'd recommend using Raycast instead. I've dong some cool things with it, like format my commit messages, generate UUIDs, and search my bookmarks with a command (/w dev -> my company's development application with a really long URL).

> Spotlight is a really good search tool

I loved Spotlight until I had to check out several project to my computer. Now with thousands of non-own files it’s really hard to find what I want. Even if I look for my own projects, Spotlight shows the same project as it appears in several node_modules as a dependency. Find out the right one means I have to hold alt on each item. Ludicrous.

It's not worth it if my computer heats up to 85 degrees for an hour and a half every few days. Really throws a wrench in my productivity and has already made me miss a couple meetings. Raycast looks neat, but I'm not interested in adding Yet Another Random Closed-Source Tool to my Mac. At this point I'm mostly using it as a dumb terminal and even that is testing my limits with how annoying Homebrew and the FreeBSD 4.1-ass kernel is.

> has already made me miss a couple meetings.

Congratulations on a novel permutation of “the dog ate my meeting notification” :-)

More like "my computer's CPU is pinned so high that I can't do the screenshare I promised you earlier, because I made the mistake of trying to rebase 15 minutes before I was scheduled to appear"

> and the solution was to disable search indexing.

It isn’t clear to me from that text, so just in case you don’t know: you can disable Spotlight indexing for specific directories (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp2811/mac)

> * Put the Dock left or right, vertical space is precious (trust me, do it for a week and then decide)

"vertical space is precious" indeed. Yet Microsoft recently decided that this stopped being the case, and now you need 3rd party tools to have the taskbar on the side.

Somewhat unrelated to the wider discussion, sorry. It just makes me angry/sad :/

> Learn about the screenshot shortcuts CMD+shift+{3,4}, 3: full screen, 4: select area or switch to window select with hitting space bar once.

I just learned about command-shift-5 for screen recordings, which is super nice for showing a visual diff of work done.

Command-shift-6 to take a picture of your Touch Bar, if you Mac has one.

Some really good ones missed: - iStat menu (better looking MenuMeters) - Alfred (MUCH better spotlight) - BetterTouchTools (keyboard, gesture, and other UX customization and macros, oh and window snapping with mouse and shortcuts)

I've been using Raycast [0] as an alternative to Spotlight and Alfred. Super fast file search, good looking and very extensible with its large community. Plus, it's a YC company :).

[0]: https://raycast.com/

Paid version of alfred includes a clipboard manager and the ability to create workflows like add emojis or integrate with let’s say dash for documentation search etc. very nice, telepathy-like experience.

I couldn't imagine navigating macOS without gestures. Great on touchpad, non-existent on any comfortable third-party mouse (the magic mouse is made for toddlers apparently.. I don't even have particularly large hands).

Thankfully someone made an LUA script for the Logitech G app to use one of the random buttons on my gaming mouse to imitate three-finger swipes, which feels great: https://github.com/mark-vandenberg/g-hub-mouse-gestures/blob...

I also am not a huge fan of Finder. Might be able to tweak so that the list view is default but crazy to me that you'd have folders and files just floating around in space.

All that being said I went from lifelong Windows user to being fully onboard with Mac once I started developing professionally. PC gaming is the only reason I have a Windows machine at all. Windows is just gnarly, from the kernel to the UI.

Maybe this is heresy but I use the Magic Trackpad with my Mac Mini because the gestures are indespensable and the Magic Mouse kinda sucks.

I've been driving gestures since my 2008 MBP. Gestures have become an integral part of my workflow, and using BetterTouchTool [1] I use CMD+4 finger swipes to throw windows to either side of the screen, or to maximize them. CMD+4-finger-click runs ffmpeg on the last captured screen recording, and produces a Jira- and Slack-friendly GIF, which is draggable from the dock.

My Windows machine is for mostly for updating and gaming, in that order.

[1] https://folivora.ai/

This is my experience as well. I am a 25-year PC user. Got my first MacBook last summer. The gestures just make the whole OS experience fantastic. But I can never leave my PC behind. Without gestures the Mac os is lackluster IMO.

Autohiding the dock on the bottom works for me. Don’t need it showing full time - mostly use CMD-space to launch apps.

Some alternatives:

An IStats like: https://github.com/exelban/stats very nice looking, highly configurable. Lulu instead of LittleSnitch: https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html and a lot of others tools from the same developer.

Other pretty much required apps:

* Spectacle - gives you a normal maximise shortcut * Karabiner elements - fix home/end, swap ctrl and command on external keyboards, fix the British keyboard layout etc. Also let's you work around the bug where it forgets you have an ISO keyboard. * Itsycal - an actual calendar in your menu bar * Something to disable scroll acceleration for real mice. There are a couple of paid apps for this.

Hot Corners for Mission Control and App windows is interesting! Gonna try that today.

I've had hot corners set up this way since 10.3. I feel lost on a computer without them set up.

I'd also recommend a hot corner for "show desktop".

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