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Comment by TamDenholm | Hacker News Reader

This is totally awesome, however one of the biggest things for me since i've recently bought a mac and coming from linux is the focus follows mouse issue, which i know has been attempted to get working but failed.

Other things i miss are basics like double clicking the title bar to maximise, right clicking to create a new file and a few other things i miss from linux.

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I know OSX does a lot of things right, but focus follows mouse and copy-on-select/paste-on-middle-click are two things that I can't live without.

Count me in on missing focus follows mouse too. FWIW, you can get Terminal to support this by:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

Also with XQuartz, you can set X11 windows to focus follows mouse in the Preferences > Window screen.

In addition one thing I've always missed is being able to lower the Z-order of a window to the bottom of the window stack by clicking on the middle (or third) mouse button on the window title bar.

Though neither mode is perfect in all situations, on balance I prefer focus-follows-mouse.

I do NOT care for copy-on-select, I like copy to be an explicit action. That way I can select, copy, select, paste to replace. With copy-on-select, you have to select, paste, select, delete which is less natural for me.

copy-on-select is great as long as the other clipboard still exists too (this is typically the case in linux). What is the downside, if you can still ctrl-c/ctrl-v to a separate clipboard?

Terminal emulators that rely only on copy-on-select to copy terminal text.

You can have both of these in iterm2. There are also copy-on-select plugins for browsers.

Just got my Mac. I am trying to figure out how to efficiently run a Linux virtual machine.

Take a look at Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com). It's a command line driver and library manager for VirtualBox VMs. It's integrated with Chef and Puppet if automated provisioning is your thing.

I am. It is ridiculously slow. But I realized it is just a networking issue (hitting the host-only network from a browser on my Mac), so hopefully I can fix it.

Edit: Figured it out, DNS issue: sudo apt-get remove libavahi-common3

edit /etc/nsswitch to remove mdns from the list... that takes care of the issue and you can keep avahi for some of the other things it provides (such as automatic discovery of printers, and the likes).

VirtualBox should serve you well.

Completely agreed. This is the one thing holding me back from fully switching from Linux to OS X. They seem like such minor things--it's amazing how big of a difference it makes not having them.

I don't understand what you mean by 'focus follows mouse issue'. Please explain more, maybe there's a solution to that (whatever that issue is!)

On Linux, whenever you hover the mouse over a window, that window has focus. On OS X, you have to click in that window in order for it to gain focus.

Steve Yegge mentioned in a rant[0] a while back.

[0] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/settling-osx-focus...

You do have to enable this setting in Linux. By default, most Linux distributions behave like Windows and OSX, so folks like me who never used Unix workstations have no way of knowing they're missing out on what I consider one of the key advantages of the Linux desktop. I finally learned about it from Steve Yegge's blog post. Ironically, three years after falling in love with focus-follows-mouse because of Yegge's frustration with OSX, I joined a company that is all OSX on the desktop. Le sigh....

For whatever reason, OS X does work that way for scrolling; while typing this comment I can point at and scroll the window behind this one. Not sure why typing doesn't behave the same, though.

Even more: while holding command key you can click on background windows, or select text in them without them gaining focus.

Been a Mac user for years and did not know this. Thanks!

I see.

I have to say I like OS X's behavior much much more. Directing key strokes to a window that my mouse just happens to point to would be very confusing (to me at least).

In focus follows mouse mode, moving the pointer onto a window gives it focus.

Have you tried using shortcut keys instead of the mouse? I find the more I keep my hands on the keyboard the faster everything becomes.

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