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Comment by megamark16 | Hacker News Reader

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,000. I've been running Ubuntu (and recently Linux Mint) full time for both work and personal use for a year and a half.

In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.

When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size. I saw an app a while ago that would let you control how your OSX apps are resized when you maximize them, but if I have to buy an app just to make my OS do what it should do anyway, there's something wrong.

I need 10 different apps on a Mac just to do what I can do out of the box in Ubuntu. Nautilus can access Windows network shares, SSH/SFTP/FTP access, and can mount NTFS, HFS, and pretty much any other filesystem type there is.

On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.

I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard? Why do I have to google it and use a 3+ key combination to enable showing hidden files? I'm all for keyboard shortcuts, I'm a keyboard man, but until I learn and memorize them, you should put them in the menu where I can find them with a little hunting.

And that reminds me, why can't I type a path in Finder? I prefer an address bar, where I can type a path to a directory I want to view, but noooo, I have to click around, and if it's a really deep folder I'm trying to get to I'm screwed.

I like Home and End keys. Where are they?

In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.

Maybe for some people this locked down, dumbed down environment works for them. Maybe some people love learning the myriad of keyboard shortcuts needed to get stuff done on a Mac, but I prefer Ubuntu, I can get stuff done a lot faster and without wanting to kill myself.

View on HN

Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't:

> In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.

They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it.

> When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size.

There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that.

> Nautilus can access Windows network shares, SSH/SFTP/FTP access, and can mount NTFS, HFS, and pretty much any other filesystem type there is.

One of these might be for you: http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/utilities-roundups/5-altern...

> On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.

Darwin ports? Fink?

> I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard?

  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE ?

Or just use the terminal ?

> And that reminds me, why can't I type a path in Finder?

CMD-Shift-G

> I like Home and End keys. Where are they?

Erh, fn-ArrowLeft/ArrowRight ?!

> In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.

The keyboard tab in Terminal's preferences? Or switch from Emacs-like to Vim-like navigation in the terminal?

> Maybe for some people this locked down, dumbed down environment works for them.

As I said, to each his own and there are valid concerns/tradeoffs about OS X. But in this particular case, the only thing "dumbed down" here is your rant.

> They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it.

You don't have to hold down ALT - you can do it without, holding down ALT increases the window edge hit area to make it easier to resize it.

> There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that.

And makes using multiple monitors even more pathetic on OS X by effectively disabling other outputs - on top of the age-old problem of the menu for a window on a secondary monitor being displayed on the primary monitor, etc, etc...

> And makes using multiple monitors even more pathetic on OS X (the menu for a window on a secondary monitor being displayed on the primary monitor, etc, etc)...

Yes, that's one of my gripes too. Note that I didn't say OS X was perfect. I took issue with this pompous litany of faux issues.

  > I took issue with this pompous litany of faux issues.

You are either accusing the poster of out-right deception in order to make OSX look back, or you are attacking the user for real issues that he/she came up against. Which is it?

(If it's the later, then I view this as the Mac version of the Linux literate telling new users to 'RTFM' instead of being helpful.)

Weder-noch (neither nor)!

I'd take the "pompous" back if I could. But yeah, "RTFM" (Mac edition); it's a good idea to put in some minimal search effort before writing a long list of pseudo-issues. There are real issues that could have been discussed instead and compared between systems to learn sth.

the age-old problem of the menu for a window on a secondary monitor being displayed on the primary monitor

That sounds very easy to fix when talking in a forum, but I bet there are a million corner cases. Worse, real users (as opposed to people who can look around a web page when a button moves) would have a hard time. "I have two file menus now, I'm scared!"

OS X isn't perfect, but, for the problem it's trying to solve, it does a really good job. I still don't have a better alternative for my needs that range from scripting and compiling through photoshop and sales presentations. Especially one that works so reliably in a consumer environment.

I'm about to buy a new laptop. I've been putting a lot of thought into it, and Linux just isn't there yet (mostly 3rd party apps I need) and Windows lack of unix underpinnings means fighting Cygwin or running a VM all the time (though I'm finally starting to get the mid-to-late 90s taste of Microsoft out of my mouth :).

>> I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard?

> defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE ? > Or just use the terminal ?

You just proved his point.

> You just proved his point.

Granted, it's not candy-color obvious. But for a developer working on Linux, "hard" should represent a different barrier than for Joe Sixpack, yes?

There is a distinction between "doable" and "usable".

I should switch to Terminal every time I want to toggle hidden file visibility?

Or write a service to install on my Finder toolbar. (I did this, because I'm not Joe Sixpack, but it's still annoying. If I wanted to write my own UI, I wouldn't have gone out and bought one.)

Apple has decided that regular users should never see hidden files. I can see how this might be annoying to you, but I don't think I can be convinced that it's a bad justification.

>I should switch to Terminal every time I want to toggle hidden file visibility?

You only need to run that command once.

Someone wrote a little app that toggles it, but honestly, if you care that much about it to ask, just leave the hidden files visible all the time. I've found it to be the path of least confusion.

This widget works great for show/hide hidden files:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/hiddenfil...

Perhaps it is better to answer the "why is that so hard?" question instead.

I expect that it is because most people don't need or want that option. You could make an argument that there should be a checkbox for it in Finder preferences like in Windows, but even that isn't as straight forward as it sounds. Microsoft has split "hidden files" into multiple levels with UI checkboxes for two levels, "hidden" and "hidden system" files, though there are other files which are more hidden and never appear in Windows Explorer. Even people who want to see some hidden files probably don't want to see them all. And we've not even gotten into files which are backed by multiple file streams - you could make an argument for making it possible to show them too, since you might want to save disk space by deleting one stream but not the other.

But the real answer, I think, is that it is hard because these are the sorts of things you should probably be doing in the terminal in the first place, where ls -a works just fine.

>> On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.

> Darwin ports? Fink?

I've used both for the past near-decade (fink for 4 years, now macports for the past 3), along with a Debian desktop, and they're much worse imo. They do the job sort of, but it's a mess. Stuff just outright breaks much more often than even in Debian 'unstable'; you'll install a package and it'll fail to compile, fail to link, a script will die, etc. Dependencies are a mess, especially as regards versions of interpreted languages (python/perl/etc.), and anything that interacts with X11 tends to be flaky. And the use of binary packages is still very spotty, so a simple install, if it pulls in big library dependencies, might spawn an hour or two of compilation, rather than a few minutes of installation.

It gets the job done somewhat, but I'm not really happy with the situation overall; for many things I prefer to use a Debian VirtualBox install, despite that also having some awkwardness.

Dump both macports and fink and use Homebrew instead: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

I fail to see how anyone can recommend homebrew as a viable solution to package management on OS X. You have to compile everything.

Coming from apt-get or yum makes brew, port, and fink look like a joke.

If you're installing that many large UNIX packages I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are probably a lot of reasons you'd be better off on Linux.

I'm using both Linux and OS X regularly. Apt is awesome, without a doubt, particularly for the breadth of software available. And on the whole, I agree that Homebrew is considerably inferior. But there is one aspect I'm liking better about the Homebrew/Mac approach. With Homebrew I can have the latest software without a problem, because the OS itself is not so hooked in to the web of package manager dependencies. In many cases on Linux I just wait until the next OS release to upgrade software - because toying with the huge dependency graph is not worth it. Maybe I should switch to a rolling release distro? I haven't tried that. But I do like the ability to upgrade software without so many inter-dependencies.

In many cases on Linux I just wait until the next OS release to upgrade software - because toying with the huge dependency graph is not worth it. Maybe I should switch to a rolling release distro? I haven't tried that.

When I most recently used Linux on the desktop, in 2010, I finally grew frustrated enough with Ubuntu's screen management setup (there was no way to get it to respect my wishes for it to turn off the screen completely, until I finally killed the power manager entirely) that I switched to Arch. That was superficially better (stuff mostly worked as advertised), but the rolling release means either keeping up to date and dealing with constant breakage ("Oh, look, the new kernel has a broken driver for my audio card", or "Oh, another update, another few hours troubleshooting Wine. Yay"), or waiting a while and having the update become riskier and riskier.

Linux will be ready for the desktop when updating doesn't mean near certainty that something breaks. I realize that things used to be more broken, but when I used Linux as my primary desktop back in 1998-2003, my expectations were lower. Being a Mac user for 5-6 years seriously reduced my patience with troubleshooting random problems just to get all the functionality that the system I'm using claims to provide.

You want to use a distro with an LTS release. Switching to Arch and being surprised that pacman -Syu causes occasional breakage is not a failure of Linux at large.

I was more resigned than surprised. Annoyed, perhaps. Anyway, an LTS release would be guaranteed not to work with newer software, from my experience with them. Apologetics centering on users being prepared for normal updates to break random things do not forward Linux, in my opinion.

It's not clear to me that there's any way to get the level of polish needed for a major desktop OS without at least an army of (very critical) testers and developers, and maybe without forking most of the packages in the distro. Nevertheless, if OS X continues down the apparent path it's on, I'll be switching back again in a few years.

Yes, you should try switching to a rolling release distro. Arch is great. I've been using it for the last five or six years now and have had no desire to switch to a new main distro, though I try out the major ones periodically and install them for certain applications.

Arch is definitely the best workstation for a developer. The convenience of binary packages, the flexibility of PKGBUILDs (analogous to Gentoo's ebuilds, but much more reasonable), vanilla packages and quick releases make it a dream workstation for a developer, despite a rare wonkiness here or there. It works much better than Ubuntu et al for a development box.

Building from source isn't necessarily a bad thing: some Linux packages have the same behavior (e.g. Portage, on which MacPorts is based). There are pros and cons to both approaches.

Package management is definitely a disaster on OS X, though. Regardless of whether you use Homebrew, Fink, or MacPorts, packages tend to break often. Some of this may be unavoidable: there are enough differences between Linux and OS X that compiling programs developed for Linux for OS X is bound to cause problems.

I have been using HomeBrew on Mac OS X and it is miles ahead of where MacPorts and Fink are. Definitely worth a try.

Miles ahead how? It's the same thing, but written in Ruby instead of Perl (Fink) or Tcl (MacPorts).

Homebrew tries to use the default libs and utilities that come with OS X / Xcode.

MacPorts and Fink try to create their own little microcosm of a Linux system complete with all libraries and utilities. They generally seem to fail at this because major packages are broken all the time and conflict in a million little ways with the system ones.

MacPorts and Fink try to create their own little microcosm of a Linux system complete with all libraries and utilities.

That's more like a philosophical (and failure prone) difference that both Fink and MacPorts intentionally abandoned through experience, not really a "miles ahead" difference.

Not reproducing Apple's OS dependencies is a nice idea, but let's say I want to use python2.7 with openssl 1.0. Apple only shipped openssl 0.9.8 in Lion. If I mix modules that use OpenSSL 1.0 and OpenSSL 0.9.8, weird stuff happens. Now what?

(The answer is: now you have to start reproducing OS dependencies. This only gets worse as the OS dependencies grow more stale).

They generally seem to fail at this because major packages are broken all the time and conflict in a million little ways with the system ones.

I haven't observed this.

I think some of the points are valid; there may be solutions but they are so obscure that people obviously never discover them. I've had a MBP for nearly a year now and never knew that Fn+Left/Right substituted for Home/End (thanks for the tip, btw). I can't see myself guessing Cmd+Shift+G to type paths into Finder either... They're valid solutions but normally Linux is (not unjustifiably) castigated for requiring obscure wizardry to do things, I don't see why OSX should get away with it either.

It is wizardry because it is baked into the OS that people will use the mouse or they will dive in and learn the incantations.

What to go to the end of a line? Click there. FWIW, I prefer ctrl-e and the other emacs bindings myself.

One handy thing is that because OS X uses Command for most of its window-management and application hot-keys, control + key is almost always unmasked by the application. Why is this important? Control-A and Control-E work in almost any text input! They work in Adium, they work in Chrome for the location bar and this textarea, and I'm sure many others.

I was pleasantly surprised because the Windows/Linux systems tend to mask Control-A for select-all.

All native text inputs support Emacs keybindings. The only rub is that you need to use Ctrl + Option to Meta.

To me I think of it as Bash bindings, because that is where I learned them. For text editing I've been using vim bindings, but I never found the vim mode to work quite like I want it to on the terminal. I should look into that more.

I was pleasantly surprised because the Windows/Linux systems tend to mask Control-A for select-all.

Linux maybe. I have never had it fail in windows and think you may be misremembering how it works.

I mean they mask control-A to select all instead of moving the cursor to the beginning of the line.

That's because control-A is supposed to select all on Windows.

They work in every Cocoa text field. Ctrl-[abefnp] ... not sure if I missed any. Those are the ones I use daily.

It’s no less obscure than other operating systems in this regard. I can’t see the difference.

Are you sure? On a windows box, there's a key with "End" written on it. Much more guessable than fn+right arrow.

End? What does that mean? Does it quit the current app? Does it shutdown? I’m really confused! And this strange Home key, what’s that for? Going to my start page? Showing the desktop? Start menu? What’s going on?!

It's pretty easy to push a key and find out what it does compared to imagining a key combination and trying to figure if that key combination even does anything

Not only that but, as a new mac user, it seems like there are several common keystroke types. Fn+x, ctrl+x, alt+x, cmd+x, cmd+shift+x; maybe there's some logic behind it but i can't find any. It seems like the windows system is a bit more understandable.

(if there's something obvious that i'm missing someone please tell me!)

Cmd: this is an important command we expect you to use a lot.

Shift-cmd: wow this program has a lot of commands that people want shortcuts for.

Shift-ctrl/alt: holy shit this program has a lot of commands.

Shift-ctrl-alt: this program is probably old enough to vote, and has a huge ton of commands

Alt: rarely used alone outside of terminal

Ctrl: see alt

Fn: NOT ON ALL KEYBOARDS. Used to force f-keys to output f-key codes instead of doing media control stuff, or to change cursors into page-up/dn/start/end.

That’s typical Windows chauvinism.

I think learning that 'end' means 'end of document' is a lot more intuitive than fn+right.

The canonical shortcuts are Cmd-left/right/up/down, which move the cursor to the absolute left, right, top, and bottom of the document, respectively. This makes perfect sense.

Home and End behave differently, they move the viewport to the beginning or end of the document but do not move the cursor. They are like scrolling in that you don't lose your position. I'm not sure, but I think that page up and down (Fn-up and Fn-down) behave similarly. I never use these though.

They way I learned it is, I pushed it to see what happened. Voila, it means end of line.

There are home and end keys on a full-size Mac keyboard, too. They're not there on the compact keyboard layout, but many Windows laptops have home/end mapped to other keys, as well. Granted, that's usually is indicated on the keys, whereas it's not on the Mac, but you still have to go hunting for them the first time you need them and one time is all it takes to learn their location.

...those home and end keys unfortunately don't take you to the beginning or end of a line like on Windows or Linux...they take you to the top/bottom of the document! one of the more painful parts of my switching process was un-training myself to hit home to get to the beginning of a line (these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis)...you're almost better off without having those keys.

Late to this, but...

> these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis

That isn't true. OS X actually has a very powerful and easy-to-use (but NOT easy-to-discover) method of controlling key bindings, and it applies instantly to ALL Cocoa applications (which, now that Finder and iTunes are Cocoa, means every common GUI application except Firefox).

This isn't my link, but here is an excellent site that describes the Cocoa text system:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....

And, if you're interested, here is the DefaultKeyBindings file that i've use on every OS X-based Mac i've ever had to fix Apple's default Home/End/PgUp/PgDn implementation:

https://github.com/ohkine/configs/blob/master/KeyBindings/De...

Funny, on older Macs it was written on the key. It's so ingrained now that I hadn't really noticed they'd taken it off.

Actually, I liked text manipulations shortcuts in native text input fields. They are very consistent and easy to get used to.

Option (Alt) means "word". Opt+Left — move one word left, Opt+Right — move one word right.

Cmd means "all". Cmd+left — move to beginning of line, Cmd+right — move to the end of line, Cmd+up — move to the beginning of the text, Cmd+down — move to the end of text.

PgDown/PgUp/Home/End mean the same thing as in other systems, but without moving the cursor. All this might be a little frustrating at first, but it's muscle memory and you can figure the logic out in a couple of days. Don't fight the system, embrace it.

As for cmd+shift+g, you can look these shortcuts up in the menu, if you are not sure where to look, use help/search, type go to and the top item will be what you are thinking about. That said, finder still sucks.

I can only imagine you were downvoted by accident...

As a relatively recent Mac convert, the whole "Option (Alt)" thing still gets me. I regularly see shortcut hints and then have to sit there for a few seconds thinking "Which one's the Option key again?"

The confusion is in part perpetuated by Apple, who can't seem to make up their mind on the matter.

My UK MacBook Pro keyboard has "alt" and doesn't mention "option" at all. They have also shipped keyboards that just say option (no mention of alt). Many of their keyboards have both printed on them.

In most of their user-facing documentation it is referred to as the "Option" key. In Cocoa, it is the "Alternate" key.

The menus don't mention either: they use the ⌥ symbol. Which is on some, but not all of their keyboards.

Yeah, the only reason I knew about Fn-arrows was because my old MacBook actually labelled them: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/15837.jpg For some reason the labels are not part of the new design (no numeric keypad emulation either). I guess they thought it was too busy a design?

The issue there is that coming from a Windows environment the terminology isn't exactly the same. The command is called "go", hence Cmd + Shift + G.

It would be useful if one could enter keystrokes into the search bar in the 'Help' panel. That would solve a lot of keystroke identification issues and familiarize them with OS X fairly quickly.

They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it

He meant, you can click anywhere in the window and use Alt. If you left-click, it moves the window. If you middle-click it (apparently - I did not know this) will resize the window.

Mac OS X has oddly small targets for many of the Window management things. You have to be careful with the mouse when finding a resize corner (Lion makes it a little better) and the traffic light buttons are such a frustration that I'm led to believe they are not really meant to be used in an efficient work flow. You're better off enabling double-click-to-minimize or using Cmd-H to make a window go away.

There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that. But that green button is still there and still behaves strangely. It's funnily called the zoom button. Naturally when you click it in iTunes you expect the iTunes window to.... shrink down to a compact size. I know the purpose of it is to 'change the window size to fit the content' - a nice concept but doesn't seem intuitive or easy to grasp for everyone.

Darwin ports? Fink?

Haha. I tried to get rdiff-backup or duplicity installed using MacPorts on Lion - it started by trying to install python2.4. And failed.

Anyway, this is not much of problem with Mac OS X - but despite being a Unixy system, I found it odd that certain tools are actually easier to run on Windows that on a Mac (not all but some)

Overall I like Mac OS X - it has great boot/shut down/sleep times, it can run a bash prompt as well as Photoshop and Word. But I'm skeptical about its usability being, on the whole, better than a Windows 7 system.

It's better in certain ways but worse in others.

> Mac OS X has oddly small targets for many of the Window management things.

I actually like this about OS X. When i heard that Lion added resize-from-any-side, i was annoyed, because i feared it would be Windows 7-esque (in that on W7 there is this 20- or 30-pixel dead zone around the edges of every window where you can't get anything done except resize). I found the final implementation on OS X to be surprisingly good.

> Naturally when you click it in iTunes you expect the iTunes window to.... shrink down to a compact size. I know the purpose of it is to 'change the window size to fit the content' - a nice concept but doesn't seem intuitive or easy to grasp for everyone.

iTunes and Finder are outliers when it comes to what the zoom button does. To Apple's credit, a few versions ago they did try to make iTunes more consistent by making the zoom button work as described. However, there was an ENORMOUS backlash from people who liked the former behaviour and found the keyboard shortcut (OpenApple+M i think — it's in the menu somewhere, but i never use the mini-player because it's stupid) too excruciating to use instead, so they switched it back around for the next version.

The mini player is back?! Great.

I was one of the vocal complainers when CMD-Shift-M didn't do what I expected it to do in iTunes. And I know it breaks the HIG but having the controls tucked in a corner was better than having the entire application disappear to the Dock.

FYI, I just installed duplicity and rdiff-backup through Homebrew and it worked flawlessly. Agree that MacPorts is crap. But Homebrew is actually pretty good.

Thanks. Will try it.

Edit: Yup, flawless installation and fast. Thanks again! I wish I had found this when I was trying to re-install Python Imaging Library after upgrading to Lion. I might have saved half a day.

I just ran: sudo port install duplicity sudo port install rdiff-backup

Worked flawlessly, too.

MacPorts isn't crap just because it isn't -- for whatever reason -- what you want.

Last time I looked, Homebrew wasn't even trying to deal with conflicting dependencies, or any of the other hard corner cases of package management. MacPorts at least makes a decent effort on that front.

Has it improved recently?

Homebrew is far superior to Macports or Fink IMO. In some ways I prefer brew install'ing to apt-get'ing. The packages are often far more up to date. I am not a fan of the transition from spaces to mission control. At least you can rearrange windows in mission control, before that update I was pretty unhappy with OS X.

I think your comments just highlight the user unfriendlyness. Am I really supposed to enter some cryptic shell command I copied from the internet to be able to see my hidden files?

I can never remember keyboard shortcuts, even for screenshots I have to Google every time because I make them only infrequently.

Instead of buying an alternative file manager, why not just install another OS...

There are a lot of options that are modified by the plist mechanism ("defaults write ..."). They tend to be little things of a very unixy character that serious nerds would like.

It makes about as much sense as changing a .login or .profile or .ssh/config or .emacs or .exrc or .Xdefaults or ... . At least it's always the same tools and the same file format.

Like you, I don't remember the screenshot shortcuts. I know vi and emacs bindings backwards and forwards, but I don't much like remembering special-purpose bindings. So I just use "Grab", the screenshot app (comes standard with OS X).

Grab saves in .tiff. If you want .png, just use:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

;-)

> I think your comments just highlight the user unfriendlyness.

More like I invested some time to learn the system I use.

But I'm curious, which system do you suggest is so "user friendly" that everything is instantly and intuitively discoverable without resort to documentation or google whatsoever? Or are you telling me that you learnt, I presume, Linux incantations from staring at the keyboard and deep breathing?

> Am I really supposed to enter some cryptic shell command

Yes, you are. It's a standard shell command. You can even look it up on Google in 5 secs. You want every option and contingency printed on the screen or keyboard?

> I can never remember keyboard shortcuts

My rule is, if I really need a shortcut, I'll remember it because I use it so often; if I only need it sometimes, I look it up in my notes or on Google; and if I only use it once or twice, what's the use of the shortcut in the first place? I disable it (if it's on by default) and save the combination for sth I might actually use.

> Instead of buying an alternative file manager, why not just install another OS...

Yeah right, and if a fly flies through your window, I assume you also pull out the flame thrower, yes? :-D

The full-screen mode is terrible. It leaves everything but your main monitor completely empty, making it essentially unusable for anyone with multiple monitors.

Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.

> Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.

If it was a real issue someone would have packaged up GCC or LLVM. There is absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from doing this. The truth is that nobody actually minds installing Xcode to get a compiler. Or at least the few who do don't actually care enough to do something about it.

And if you get Xcode, you also have Shark for performance optimization.

> If it was a real issue someone would have packaged up GCC or LLVM

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

As someone who works at a software startup where the engineers use Macs, trust me we mind when we have to dig around to find the correct Xcode installer for Snow Leopard or whatever. Just because Apple has decided Xcode 4 should be in the app store, does not mean that our developers running Snow Leopard (which has fewer bugs with our mission critical apps like vagrant, for example) should be SOL.

People who realize how stupid it is to install several gigabytes of Xcode for a C compiler also tend to get irked by other weird Apple policies, thus a significant percentage of them switch operating systems instead of packaging up GCC to try and change the Apple ecosystem.

> > In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while. > The keyboard tab in Terminal's preferences? Or switch from Emacs-like to Vim-like navigation in the terminal?

Here's some Terminal editing text:

- `alt-left / right` skips a word in either direction (these work in the entire cocoa text system)

- `esc backspace` deletes an entire word

- `ctrl-a and ctrl-e` skip to the beginning and end of the line respectively (again, entire cocoa text system)

- `ctrl-k` deletes any character from the cursor to the end of line (ditto)

Also, learning how to use these bash tricks will make your life a lot easier too:

- `!!` will repeat the previous command, and you can prefix it. Say you forgot to `sudo` something, just type `sudo !!` to repeat it.

- `!whatever` will repeat the last command in the history starting with `whatever`.

- `!$` will evaluate to the argument of the previous command. so `ls Desktop` followed by `echo !$` will echo "Desktop."

> They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it.

But when you do press ALT .. magic! The window resizes on both sides! Awesome feature :-)

Try holding down the Shift-key as well (i.e. Shift-Alt-drag)

:-)

DarwinPorts/MacPorts, Fink, and Homebrew all require the OS X developer tools, so "you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source" still applies.

I count myself as a Mac power user, but I definitely learned something from your post.

Perhaps there should be a "power user FAQ", one that covers "how to make Mac OS X 10.X more like Max OS X 10.(X-1)".

"the only thing "dumbed down" here is your rant."

What are you talking about? Almost all of your rejoinders are poorly discoverable or require unexpected amounts of effort.

fn-arrow left/fn-arrow right is a pretty pathetic substitute for actual home and end keys. I've never used a Mac for a prolonged period of time so can't speak to other points, but I am baffled at how people can do anything without those keys. When I try to debug some code on one of my coworkers' Macs I feel like I suddenly can't type anymore because of their absence, not bs'ing or exaggerating.

If you're going to judge it based on your existing preconceptions, of course it's going to come up short.

Windows: The button makes the open window fill the screen.

Mac OS: The button instructs the app to make the window larger to fit the open document.

With larger and larger desktop screens (27" iMacs, 30" Cinema Displays), the old idea that you'd want the one window to fill the screen doesn't hold as often. Then came the rise of the laptop and it does hold again. So Lion gained fullscreen.

This doesn't mean it wasn't frustrating, or badly done by many programs, but I object to you describing one way as "what should happen" as if there is a standard, or as if OS X < 10.7 claims to do fullscreen but fails to. You're buying an App to make it work like another system, because you prefer that behaviour.

If you're going to judge it based on your existing preconceptions, of course it's going to come up short.

Guilty as charged. I used a Mac for about 9 months, and I never got used to it, I never stopped being frustrated by the things that were difficult, annoying, or just plain Fisher Price dumbed down by default. I'm a developer, I could (and for a lot things I did) figure stuff out, tinker with stuff, but I just wasn't that in love with the whole package, so I didn't put forth that much effort to make it my home. If I had been moving from Windows, maybe I wouldn't have had as much of a a problem making the transition, but I found that I had been so spoiled by Linux, and fallen in love with the whole idea behind it, that I just couldn't cope. Is that the fault of OSX? Surely not, it was a personal thing, but I really love Linux, and I think I'm going to stick with it.

With that being said, the hardware is stellar. If I hadn't run into so many problems trying to dual boot I might have held onto the hardware.

I went from being a total Windows junkie to loving OSX since I switched over in May. No regrets. My windows desktop is left sitting, while I use my MacBook Pro all the time. I don't know exactly what you consider dumbed down, while some parts are now hidden, they can easily be found with minimum effort.

It's certainly not dumbed down compared to Windows. Shoot, you've got a full bash shell included out of the box! It only felt dumbed down (or maybe I should say "locked down, and candy coated") when compared to my Linux desktop, which gives me a huge amount of customization freedom and built in power tools. I went from Windows to Linux, then to OSX, and I missed a lot of things about Linux while not feeling like I gained anything extra. I'd take OSX over Windows any day, but at the end of the day I want to be working in Linux.

I share your sentiments. Me too couldn't get used to OSX even after months of trying. While, with its underlying unix philosophy, it is close to Linux, it's never quite there, and what bothers the most is the obviously intentional decision to disable all kinds of UI customizations. Put a proprietary codebase on top of that and we, as regular Linux users, feel stuck and helpless most of the time.

What I do right now, as I didn't want to refuse the company's MacBook Pro, is dual boot Debian on it. Except for the fact that I couldn't get integrated GPU to work instead of the discrete one, I haven't had any problems with them working together. Excellent OS on excellent hardware (I wouldn't call it stellar though, I have few complaints there as well).

>Then came the rise of the laptop and it does hold again. So Lion gained fullscreen.

So your argument is that Lion's fullscreen is a response to these newfangled laptop things?

Basically, yes. More specifically, they could have responded to Windows's fullscreen button years ago, or consumer griping years ago, I think it most likely that they saw iPad as a success in terms of doing one fullscreen thing at a time, and they built an OS X version 'for' the 11 and 13" MacBook Air with fullscreen.

I.e. I don't think they made fullscreen primarily for imac, mac pro, or 17" mbp users, or to copy windows or Linux for feature checklist purposes.

Upvoted for not taking offense at my snark :)

"Mac OS: The button instructs the app to make the window larger to fit the open document."

As others have pointed out, the zoom button is completely arbitrary, and doesn't simply fit the open document.

--- Examples ---

Terminal: fills the entire screen

Safari: instructs the app to fit the open document. (what happens if you have multiple tabs open? which documents gets fitted?)

iTunes: SHRINKS the entire player to a mini player (how did they determine that a "zoom" button should shrink something is beyond me)

---------

These are all apps that come with the system, so there is really no excuse for such arbitrary behavior. There are numerous other 3rd party apps (firefox, filezilla, etc) that simply fill up the screen.

I call it the Surprise Button because whenever you click it, you have no idea what's going to happen.

What? I don't think you understand how terminals work! The terminal commands (on every terminal I've used for the past 20 years) are interpreted by the server. If your terminal is connected to a unix machine then generally emacs key navigation is the default. This is true for Mac OS X. Meta-F and Meta-B go forward and backward by words. Meta-delete deletes a word. C-a (and the HOME key) will go to the beginning of a line. C-e (and the END key) will go to the end.

That being said there's a couple annoying (for powerusers) defaults in Terminal. I always use the "option is meta" setting so I can type Option-f when I mean M-f. Otherwise I have to type ESC-f which is harder for me. The other is that the naked HOME and END keys are by default bound to scrolling the terminal window and you have to press SHIFT-HOME and SHIFT-END to get Terminal to actually send the HOME and END character sequence through the terminal (same for page-up and page-down which are also stupidly backward). If you come from Linux and are used to using SHIFT-PAGE-UP for look at your scrollback then it can be annoying. But luckily those are easily fixed.

If what __david__ says is new to anyone, I suggest you become familiar with http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC13

Terminals border on unusable without knowing these commands.

And those commands have to be interpreted by the shell (e.g., bash) and not by the terminal emulator, because power users expect the shell to jump in, in the middle of a line, and provide information -- such as in-place file globbing or variable expansion, or command completion.

The parent comment must not be used to this standard capability.

So you hate learning the "myriad of keyboard shortcuts needed to get stuff done on a Mac," but are praising the intuitiveness of "hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it?"

Well, there are a couple of subtleties that are being addressed, that maybe need to be said better.

1) Mac keyboard shortcuts are confusing and inconsistent compared to other OSes. They're not as discoverable. Maybe this is why it seems like there are more of them or that they're harder to learn.

When I say they're confusing, I mean that they use those funky characters instead of the words Ctrl, Alt or Shift. Those characters are not on the keyboard.

When I say they're not as discoverable, I mean this: The menu system in Gnome/KDE/Win underlines the letter of the accelerator key for a menu item. This is the first type of keyboard shortcut and OS X doesn't have this at all. The other type with the key-combos is also less discoverable due to the confusing characters.

When I say it's inconsistent, I mean that a shortcut does not always exist for what you want. In Gnome/KDE/Win I can always rely on the consistency of the Alt + Menu Acclerator keys.

2) The fact that you can "hold Alt and middle click anywhere...." in Linux, I think was a testament to how Apple only offers a limited feature set; not that keyboard shortcuts are bad in general.

Ah yes, OS X keyboard shortcuts sure do have bad discoverability.

I'm in Safari, I wonder how to see page source. I click the Help menu (or Cmd-?) and type in 'source'. It finds the 'View Source' menu item. I arrow down to it and not only does it open the menu containing it, but there's a big animated blue arrow pointing at the keyboard shortcut.

And what do you know, those funky symbols are in fact printed on my keyboard. Not that I have to look at it much, because the shortcuts I use are mostly consistent between apps.

>And what do you know, those funky symbols are in fact printed on my keyboard.

Some of them are not— at least for my MacBook. The caret symbol is for the control key (think caret -> control), and the slanted-looking T is the option/alt key (if you look at the graphic as though it's a path, you can see the path takes an alternate route).

My (UK) MBP has the Alt symbol.

Control doesn't have the caret, but it isn't used nearly as much as Cmd/Alt/Shift for shortcuts (mostly reserved for further modified versions of other shortcuts, and Unixy stuff). As it happens, I do have a caret of sorts on my Control key as it's remapped on to Caps Lock ;)

I had no trouble learning and coming to like how keyboard shortcuts are done on the Mac, and that's because I didn't consider my previous environment the authoritative way to use a computer just because I used it first. (See also users obsessed with maximising every window because that was the done thing on a 15" CRT)

The US keyboard is weird. The German keyboard also has the bathtub and a symbol on the shift key (also on tab), also symbols on the enter and return keys. No caret for shift, though.

...that's pretty slick but the discoverability on Windows is still better

first..you'd have to know to think about what the feature is named...

...on Windows...you can invoke any menu by pressing ALT and then the first letter of the menu or a designated letter on a menu option (or you can use the arrows)...all windows menus get this behavior by default, in addition to separate keyboard shortcuts that can also be defined in the application

...you can get to the menus on Macs through a rather inconvenient combo CTRL-F2 (CTRL-FN-F2 on Macbooks)...but you can only arrow through commands, there are no letter shortcuts in that case.

...I like OS X, but this is one area that Windows does much better (that and multiple monitors)...

What I understand you're saying is that the keyboard shortcuts may typically be more efficient to perform in Windows. That could be true but it's a different topic from discoverability, where straight up full text search is better than collision hampered and segmented expansion of menus.

Beyond the basics (cut/copy/paste/new/save/quit/...), there's a fair chance we don't know which sub-menu the function we're searching for resides in (and shouldn't have to care).

...good point, the point I was trying to make was not so much the discoverability of the FEATURE (I do agree with your points there)...but of discoverability of the SHORTCUT to the feature, which is what you referred to as efficiency.

the fact that I (and apparently many others) learned about some OS X keyboard shortcuts through reading this thread indicates that there is still a problem with "discoverability"

Um, have you ever actually used a Mac? Like, since 1987 or so?

Mac keyboard shortcuts are:

1) Not confusing at all, the common ones date back decades and are largely similar to other platforms. 2) No, they don't use "funky characters". Command is a word. Do you have difficulty recognizing what "Command-S" means for save, or "Command-P" for print, etc? 3) I beg to differ. Command, control and option are on the keyboard. 4) Just a detail, but: "Ctrl" and "Alt" are not words. Just so you know.

I tend to agree, but working out how to move a cursor around text, with various combinations of either character by character, or word by word, or to the beginning or end of the line, and either selecting or not selecting text, was pretty frustrating.

3) My keyboard has [fn][ctrl][alt][cmd][space][cmd][alt], there's no [option].

I always thought that the text shortcuts are intuitive and easy to remember. Shortcuts you are used to are always going to be easier to remember than new ones – that is always going to distort your view. I wouldn’t put to much weight on that.

You navigate text using the arrow keys on their own (characters and lines) or with one of two modifiers: Alt (words and paragraphs) and Command (lines and text fields). If you use no modifiers you are moving around one character (left, right) or line (up, down) at a time. Alt allows you to move from word to word (left, right) or paragraph to paragraph (up, down). Command navigates to the beginning and end of the line (left, right) or text field (up, down). As you can see there is a clear and straightforward hierarchy.

People are already used to using the arrow keys to navigate text. The modifier keys do nothing more than what they are supposed to do: The arrow keys still do similar stuff than before, it’s only slightly modified. This is an excellent example of picking awesome keyboard shortcuts.

You can add Shift to any of those combinations to select instead of just moving the cursor. Command-Left moves the cursor the the beginning of the line, Command-Shift-Left selects everything between the current position of the cursor and the beginning of the line.

Shift is used for selecting things everywhere, no matter the OS. OS X definitely picks the right modifier for selecting text and everything is still consistent with moving around in text. Anyone who knows how to move around in text can easily be taught how to select text: It’s exactly the same, only with Shift.

If you use Backspace and Delete (which is Fn-Backspace on keyboards without the Delete key) together with Alt or Command you can delete words or lines respectively (as you would expect).

Again, OS X remains consistent. Backspace and Delete work with exactly the same modifiers in exactly the same way as the arrow keys. This behavior is once again easy to teach.

This all seems crystal clear to me and I’m loving it very much. I think all the key combinations make intuitive sense.

I hope I could also explain why I think that OS X is so consistent and intuitive in this regard.

You do a nice job of explaining it, and I am grateful to you. Now that you lay it out it does seem a lot more consistent than I thought.

My only minor gripe (and this is cross OS, with many softwares and keyboards) is that it's harder for touch typists to use. Compare any shortcuts that require you to take your hands from the home keys with, eg, the shortcuts provided by Wordstar.

He's referring to "the modifier key symbols you can see in Mac OS X menus". http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343

Only 1 out of 5 appears on the Apple keyboard. http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB110LL/B

Should I upload a picture of my Macbook Pro keyboard? Because the funky characters are not on there. Just the words, Fn, Control and Alt/Option. Command is the only one that has a symbol as well as a word.

Yeah, see, Mac keyboard equivalents actually predate most other OSes. So no, they're not going to change to accomodate the newcomers. option- shift- and command- arrows have been there since the 80s. Not going to change because Windows decided to do it differently.

As for discoverability, it is worse today, but historically there were no keyboard equivalents that were not in the menus (by Apple's UI guidelines), so discoverability was better on the Mac.

I don't think the environment is as locked down as you think.

Finder can access windows shares. Apple-shift-G lets you type in any path you want in Finder, and if you are at the command line you can do open <dir> to open a Finder window.

Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e at the prompt move the cursor to the beginning and end of the prompt, respectively. Someone who knows readline better than me can tell you how to move between words.

I come from a similar OS background as you, I've been using a MBP for 6 months and I love it. You just have to take the time to learn the different things with the OS, as you did when using Linux for the first time.

I will say though that I have been too nervous to upgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard.

> Someone who knows readline better than me can tell you how to move between words.

It's alt+leftArrow and alt+rightArrow.

Other useful ones which work in native text boxes:

    cmd+leftArrow and cmd+rightArrow to move to the start and end of lines in text boxes
    cmd+upArrow and cmd+downArrow to move to the very top and very bottom
    ctrl+a and ctrl+e to move to the start and end of paragraphs
    shift+ any of the above to move the current selection
    alt+backspace and cmd+backspace to delete the previous word or to the start of the line

There are more emacs-like keyboard shortcuts in the native text boxes, like ctrl+t to transpose letters, but I don't really use them that much.

Ctrl+backspace to delete the previous word in Windows always catches me out, since it works some of the time, but other times is just inserts a control character which I then also have to delete...

alt+left or alt+right doesn't work for me in Terminal out of the box (I usually use iTerm2 where it doesn't work either) - do you need to change any settings (such as emulation, terminal type etc) to get at that?

Ah, my bad, I must have set that up myself.

According to this[1] stack overflow post, the vim key bindings for move back and forward work by default (which is news to me), or you can set up the alt left and right behaviour by following the instructions here[2].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81272/is-there-any-way-in...

[2] http://blog.macromates.com/2006/word-movement-in-terminal/

It works for me right out of the box on a brand new Lion install. No settings have been changed yet.

Didn't realize that "alt" here meant the "esc" key.

I am talking about the "alt/option" key on the keyboard. No "esc".

1) Go to the Terminal menu > Settings, click the Settings pane.

2) Select your preferred theme (left). It's probably the one listed as "default."

3) Click the Keyboard tab.

4) Click the "+" button to add a new Key to Action mapping.

• Key: cursor left

• Modifier: option

• Action: send string to shell:

• In the blank blank space: \033b

  Note: This is the ESC key followed by a lowecase “b“.

• Click OK.

5) Click the "+" button to add a new Key to Action mapping.

• Key: cursor right

• Modifier: option

• Action: send string to shell:

• In the blank blank space: \033f

  Note: This is the ESC key followed by a lowercase “f“.

• Click OK.

Or just click the "option as meta" checkbox!

Thanks. Interestingly enough in iTerm2 this option is worded as "Left/Right option key acts as +Esc" rather than "Meta"

> Ctrl+backspace to delete the previous word in Windows always catches me out, since it works some of the time, but other times is just inserts a control character which I then also have to delete...

This is the single thing that prevents me from using Windows.

I dual boot with Windows on my iMac and I love the general appearance of Windows 7, much more than OS X. I feel like I can just get stuff done.

But then I try to work, and things just fail... A lack of common UI controls (Cocoa, OS X's killer feature) drives me insane when ctrl+a won't work, or a text field won't spell check for me, or I can't right click a word and get the definition of the word.

I find this is my problem with the iPhone as well. I got the iPhone 4 and 4S when they first came out as they are my best option out there, but I hate them so much. Other platforms are doing much more interesting things, such as Windows Phone 7's fresh interface, or the power of Android. However, all of these platforms lack the high level of polish and vibrant ecosystems the iPhone has.

> Someone who knows readline better than me can tell you how to move between words.

In nearly every app (MS Office excluded for the most part), and in a terminal of course, Option+f/Option+b will move forward/backward one word at a time respectively.

>In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.

In Lion it's possible to resize from any window border.

I don't know what these other complaints are. Personally, coming from Windows & Ubuntu, I just fell in love with the way everything just works in OSX. I guess I'm not a "power user" though.

> In Lion it's possible to resize from any window border.

Holding down shift and alt while doing so is also quite fun, give it a try.

Wow, I had no idea that was possible. Many thanks! I could see this being useful for resizing my Finder window without losing the nice rectangular aspect ratio I have.

"everything just works". haha. I like your sarcasm

I hear that so often from Mac fans,... just after they get done telling me about their latest problem.

As an owner/user of 4 macs, 3 windows machines and 3 ubuntu machines my personal mac experience has had no more or less problems than my windows or ubuntu experiences.

That's the mantra we all repeat at work when somebody's Mac crashes or just generally makes life difficult in some way.

I've banished my Macbook to the corner of my office, where it will stay until the next time I go on foreign travel. For SC11, I brought along my Thinkpad X201 tablet with Debian and Stumpwm; it just works.

Lion; It doesn't claim to be a maximise button; View->Go to Folder (Cmd-Sh-g); Cmd+Arrows; The emacs key bindings everyone has used since the dawn of time

You can't be bothered to learn an environment and are angry about it. Cool.

What Terminal.app has to do with cursor movement??? Anyway, redline's defaults (and Emacs') is option+f / option+b (option is meta) for words and control+a / control+e for lines.

If you asked a friend or searched Google instead of writing your problems here perhaps you would have found the solutions. You took time to learn how to use Linux and the shell, why not take some time to learn how to use OS X as well before complaining that it doesn't do what you want? It does do most of the things you mentioned, and when it doesn't it's by design.

Resizing from any side: Legitimate complaint. Fixed in Lion but this was a big annoyance until summer 2011.

Maximize: It's not a maximize button. Your expectations don't make it broken. Managing expectations of a new OS is dangerous. It's a big reason why people dislike Linux as well, and it's kind of a shame that people expect everything to behave like whatever they are used to.

Finder can access Windows shares, FTP, NTFS, HFS, etc. as well. What are you getting at with this point?

You dislike how Apple distributes their build tools. Ok. Maybe some prefer downloading an installer to running aptitude. (I prefer the package manager way as well, but it's just that: a preference.)

Finder isn't supposed to be a power tool for people who want to know what's in /usr. Hiding that stuff is the right decision. You said you enjoy the keyboard, fire up a terminal and away you go. Or run the defaults command that enables hidden files in Finder if you really need to click on hidden files all day.

Cmd-Shift-G lets you navigate to an arbitrary path in Finder. It has tab completion. You can also run `open /path/to/folder` in terminal. `open .` is often handy.

Cmd-left and Cmd-right are beginning of line and end of line navigation commands. You can also use `Ctrl-a` and `Ctrl-e`, standard Emacs shortcuts just like you're used to in the shell. Home and End are Fn-left and Fn-right if you actually wanted Home and End, which behave strangely on OS X. (They go to the beginning or end of a document without changing the position of the cursor, as Cmd-up and Cmd-down do.)

Terminal navigation shortcuts: Legitimate complaint. Because option and alt are on the same key you have to use `ESC f`, `ESC b`, etc. to navigate by word. Being a Linux geek you should know that `ESC <foo>` is equivalent to `alt-<foo>`. If you want to go to the beginning or end of line again just use `Ctrl-a` and `Ctrl-e`. (Switch caps lock to control in the Keyboard preferences for maximum convenience and comfort.)

It's not locked down or dumbed down, you just didn't take the time or effort to learn it as well as you did Linux. Maybe because you had some preconceived expectation that it was locked down and dumbed down.

Linux seems dumbed down to me after 6 years of OS X because standard keyboard shortcuts for navigation in text fields doesn't work. (Ctrl-[abefnp]) And Xmonad and the like seem primitive compared to just adding tiling goodies (Divvy, SizeUp) to a standard WM to get the best of both worlds.

Honestly it mostly just comes down to managing expectations and what you are already familiar with. Approach things with a fresh and curious child-like mind and you'll be much happier. Never stop learning, never be afraid to ask how to do something even if it seems silly. Like trying to move the damn cursor to the beginning of the line.

Despite my snarky tone I experienced a lot of the frustrations you expressed here. I just dealt with them differently and am happier for it.

>Your expectations don't make it broken.

It's not 1990 anymore. All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions. At the very least, one should offer a way for the Windows user to discover what the new conventions are, rather than having to Google and find websites that other people have made when they made the same transition.

What makes this worse is that every windowing system appears to use different terminology for its UI widgets and behaviors. Sticking to a standard terminology (even if it's Windows' terminology) would make things much easier for a convert to figure out how make their machine do what they need it to do.

> All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions.

That sounds like the worst way to innovate. I'm not saying that Apple's way is innovative but I say we are all better off if OS manufacturers try difference things to come up with better way of presenting UI.

For example, if apple followed the Window's way of displaying every single window in its Dock, then application based taskbar in Windows 7 would have never come about.

Trying different things should never be criticized for just being different. If that different way of doing things is bad, criticize it but don't point finger just because it's different.

> It's not 1990 anymore.

All the more reason not to have a maximize button. Displays only get more pixels year to year.

There is probably more work to do out the box to change this perception though. OSX needs to introduce the user to this when they first open an app then make it dead simple to control.

It's easier to have more windows on the screen, but it's still no easier to manage them. It's not a problem of pixels, but of cognitive load. For many people simply having more windows visible is distracting, even if those windows are in the background and can be ignored. Its the same reason that people would prefer a clean desk, with only one or a few things on it than one that has lots of things on it. A cluttered desk, no matter how well it's organized, is still harder to manage than a clean desk. A cluttered monitor is the same.

That's exactly what Cmd-h and Cmd-Opt-H are for. This is a solved problem on OS X.

They have of course spurned your counsel about catering to windows users throughout the last decade, all the way from "close the stores and give the money back to the shareholders" to somewhere in the neighborhood of the most successful company ever. All the while thinking it is still 1990 (the significance of which is a little hazy.)

If they didn't follow this advice when they were on life support, what would possess them to follow it now? It's hard to imagine that one could overlook the evidence (here, and everywhere) that if success is the goal, mimicking windows should be closer to a prohibition than a mandate.

> All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions.

Umm, no. I've always tried to avoid windows and it's unbelievably annoying UI conventions. Well, at least until Win XP the last windows version I have used.

And after using Linux almost exclusively for 14 years OS X feels great. And the best part is: I don't feel like I have to spend days and days trying to figure out which of the myriad of available settings I have to change to feel at home.

And the missing maximize button: Big deal. So I have to pull some windows by hand to the size I want them to have. Most applications save the last window state.

    And Xmonad and the like seem primitive compared to just adding
    tiling goodies (Divvy, SizeUp) to a standard WM to get the best
    of both worlds.

I don't use Xmonad and I don't know what you meant by "the like", but Awesome WM is vastly more powerful[1] than the OS X WM with any add-ons that I've encountered.

[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/doc/

By "the like" I mean tiling WMs. "Primitive" was the wrong word, I should have said "intrusive".

I used tiling WMs almost exclusively for quite a while. My problem with them is that they tile by default, which is fine for some things but I find it much less intrusive to add tiling actions to a "regular" WM. So I can do things like "move this window there", "make this window occupy the left half of this display", etc. I found that I really only ever wanted a handful of these kinds of commands. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

I'm afraid it would with such a plugin/script on Ubuntu Unity as the menu associated with each of the tiled windows would appear in the top bar of the screen, but I intend to play with this in Unity 2d...

http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/

Thanks for the tip on Divvy! That's really nice.

FYI, Terminal.app has an option to make Option work as the meta key, it's under Keyboard. Also, C-w deletes words.

You can also hold option and click to move within the line, although unfortunately this doesn't work if you have Option assigned as the meta key.

OS X obviously isn’t for you.

OS X doesn’t have some features you would like it to have or you need. Looking at the features you are missing it doesn’t seem like they are central for most users. If a feature is not there you simply can’t use the OS. That’s fair enough. It just doesn’t seem like that’s really a problem OS X has.

Especially when you are coming from a different background it also can be hard to understand when an OS is doing something differently. This has nothing to do with it being better or worse, it’s just different.

Alt-Arrows will move you from word to word in Terminal (and also in every other text field), Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E will move you to the beginning and end of the line. That second set of shortcuts sucks because it isn’t consistent with the whole rest of the OS where Cmd-Arrows will move you to the beginning and end of lines and texts (depending on the direction of arrow you pick). As I said, those shortcuts work in every text field and you can mix them up with Backspace or Shift to delete or select whole words or lines. Many other vi keybindings work wherever you encounter text in OS X.

Shift-Cmd-G will allow you to type a path in Finder, just like in Terminal Tab autocompletes.

The green zoom button sucks and Apple should remove it. It is not supposed to maximize (so those 99% of all apps were doing it right), it usually tries to remove scrollbars (i.e. it grows or shrinks the window until there is no more space or until there are no more scrollbars). Some apps inconsistently treat it like a maximize button. Lion introduced fullscreen apps and the new fullscreen button should be treated as an equivalent (more or less) to Windows’ maximize button.

Lion allows you to resize windows from all sides.

Alt-Arrows - is that a Lion thing? Opening up a stock iterm, and hitting...

hrm... well "alt" is above the 'option' label, so I'm not sure how to invoke that. option arrows don't move by word. fn+option (which I'd assume give me 'alt' mode) doesn't work. What's the magic invocation to make that happen? Or is it Lion only? (snow leopard here).

I’m sorry, the German keyboard confused me – there the option key is labeled alt. You can replace every Alt in my comment with Option.

I’m not sure whether that’s new (I think other shortcuts for moving from word to word were also already commented on around here) but when I fire up Terminal in Lion I can move from word to word by pressing Option-Arrow-left or Option-Arrow-right.

Hrm. Doesn't work here (US snow leopard MBP early 2011), and I'm pretty sure it's not worked on earlier versions.

Some other comments indicated "esc/b" and "esc/f", and those seem to work, but are horribly unintuitive and difficult to type. Will need to map them. I've lived X years without that ability, so another few minutes won't hurt :)

thx

iTerm != Terminal. The alt-arrows works in Lion's Terminal; I just checked (although I use iTerm, where it doesn't work). iTerm appears to be the only app that doesn't respond to ctrl/alt-arrows. I use them quite frequently, and it always trips me up that iTerm works differently than essentially every other app.

That's because alt-arrow isn't a ANSI control sequence. What should it map to? You can see what your terminal is sending with this command:

    stty -icanon -echo; od -c

Hit your key sequence then hit return a bunch of times until the line comes out. You'll see some sort of ESC sequence.

When done, control-c then type "stty sane" (it will not echo).

For iTerm I get "\e[1;9D". Terminal, interestingly is giving me "\e\eD". When I turn off my "Use option as meta key" preference in Terminal it gives me "\eD". Which is the same as plain left arrow.

Also, neither of those escape sequences does anything in bash for me.

You're right, in that they're not the same - I use the terms interchangeably sometimes and shouldn't. That said, my snow leaopard Terminal doesn't have those keystrokes working either. :/

I typically use iterm2 now, and I mapped option/left and option/right to ESC-b and ESC-f, and all is well for me. Hope that helps someone else.

if in terminal options you select "use option as meta key" [1], then option-b and option-f move forward / backward on words as normal in bash. You can also remap caps-local to control.

[1] http://earlh.com/dump/hn/terminal_settings_meta_key.jpeg

This is exactly my experience of trying to use OS X, thanks for putting it into words! The Home and End thing is by far the most annoying one (for me, but only because it's always the first one I run into whenever I find myself having to use a Mac).

It's so ridiculous that there's this mentality (everywhere) that "power users" are bad people whose needs always contradict those good, "average" users. That mythical "average" users are more noble a target audience than "power" users and so software should be made to ignore the needs of "power" users, because that's what's required to satisfy the needs of "average" users. It's nonsense and doesn't help anybody.

Has it occurred to you that being a "power user" on one platform doesn't necessarily translate to another or that another platform may be signifantly different to what you are used to? This isn't a case of OS X being different for the sake of being esoteric or being aimed at the 'average' user; rather these shortcuts have existed in Mac OS since at least the early 1980's.

Holding alt and arrow keys will move the cursor to the next word (something I miss in every other OS). Holding command and the arrow keys is like the home and end keys. Also if you're on the last line anyway just press down arrow to move cursor to after the last character (also something I miss in other environments). Combine these with shift key to do selections.

On most other OSs, ctrl and arrow keys will move you a word at a time.

I'm very happy OS X, though not perfect, is the way it is.

Many switchers expect OS X to behave like their old OS's. It's like they get imprinted on the first OS they used and can't move on.

They just don't "get it". Maybe OSX is too visual for them and they don't understand the trade-offs made to keep it simple and consistent. They don't see the 30+ years of tradition in the UI.

On top of that, Apple stupidly doesn't have a manual for learning the cool tricks - like holding down the command key when you click on a window title in the Finder to see your path history.

Maybe you and O'Reilly need one of the many O'Reilly books on the subject. This one is one of my favorite.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920014553.do?green=CC950...

Looks like you gave up on it before trying. It can do everything you complain about.

Homebrew beats apt-get any day of the week.

   Homebrew beats apt-get any day of the week.

Great argument. I'm convinced.

By the way, apt-get is an inteface for APT, and one of many, so you should have stated that Homebrew beats APT. And of course, you wouldn't have needed to substantiate that claim either, because you are, after all, ricardobeat.

Should I add "IMO"? I use both Ubuntu 10 and OSX daily, and brew packages are always more up-to-date and more reliable.

I'm not hating on your preferences, but mac laptops are competitively priced. There's no way you got equivalent hardware for $1k less.

also, cmd-G lets you type a path in finder. That is, btw, on the first result page if you google "finder type path", without the quotes.

    I'm not hating on your preferences, but mac laptops
    are competitively priced. There's no way you got
    equivalent hardware for $1k less.

Lenovo offers sales, coupons, and other deals. Signing up for deal alerts at sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet can result in huge savings. The last ThinkPad I bought was nearly 60% under retail.

Many Mac users seem to be unaware that products can be sold for less than retail price. I can understand not wanting to waste time searching for deals, but signing up for a deal alert for the words "Lenovo", "ThinkPad" or whatever takes mere seconds.

Huh, thanks, I had no idea such large discounts were available for lenovo hardware.

I used to pay attention to fatwallet but I removed all that stuff from my life because I felt like I was buying a ton of crap I didn't really want or need, just because DEAL DEAL DEAL was arriving in my inbox / rss all the time...

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