Hacker News Reader

Comment by pigs | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

VirtualBox should serve you well.

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).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com