This isn't "sensible hacker defaults", it's more like "some guy's view of what Mac OS X should be like".
The last time someone really thought about scroll direction was when they invented the scroll wheel. The implementors associated it with the motion of the position indicator in the scrollbar rather than the motion of the document. The reason this is wrong is because it's an unnecessary indirection from the document itself. At the time computers could not documents quickly enough to have any kind of physicality, so the scrollbar + indicator were critical UI elements simply for performance reasons (ie. the scrollbar is what could be drawn fast enough to enable responsive dragging, and the window wouldn't redraw til you let go). Once people got used to it, there was no reason to question it until the modernization of touch interfaces where suddenly the inconsistency became apparent.
What was the gain for disorienting the users by introducing a new default? An improvement in acceptance by users who had only used tablets and phones but never PC's? Is that a large set?
The "standard" way of doing it never made sense to me, even with a mouse scroll wheel. I scrolled down and the page would go up--how did that ever makes sense?
Have a look at it - there really is some good stuff in there. This file, and then all the cool tweaks to the Cocoa text engine that you can make, make OS X a tough OS/environment to beat.
Or did you mean that you know of a whole bunch of other tweaks that should be on the list? If so, add them and send a pull-request.
Eh, a lot of it is just some guy's arbitrary preferences, with little or nothing to do with "experienced or demanding users". Stuff like hiding the bookmarks bar in Safari or showing track notifications in the Dock is experience neutral.
Other than that, there's a few nice tweaks (like unhiding ~/Library), and the occasional disastrous idea (killing the executable quarantine).
Completely agree - but someone has to keep this compendium somewhere, and why not keep it as a piece of working code, rather than as a web page or something? If you end up having to use a lot of different Macs and have to set up new accounts for yourself on a regular basis, what you'd probably do is fork the project here, eliminate the stuff you hate, and then that's your acceptable-mac-environment-maker script.
occasional disastrous idea (killing the executable quarantine).
Out of curiosity, why is this disastrous? I'm not a fan of the idea, but I can imagine how someone might come to hate com.apple.finder.quarantine badly enough to do this? Maybe this particular tweak should be commented out by default, though.
I think this would make sense if it was a compendium, but this is an arbitrary subset of everything you could possibly set via defaults, with no rhyme nor reason to what is and isn't in the list other than "this particular guy cares about these particular things".
> Out of curiosity, why is this disastrous? I'm not a fan of the idea, but I can imagine how someone might come to hate com.apple.finder.quarantine badly enough to do this?
I can imagine being annoyed at any number of things, but that doesn't mean turning them off is a good idea.
Security is all about layers, and disabling an important layer (and especially a layer you'll rarely trip over once you have all your commonly used apps downloaded) doesn't strike me as a bright idea. It only takes one bug in your browser of choice to con it into launching an arbitrary executable, or one asleep at the wheel moment to trick you into double-clicking a cleverly icon'd malicious app; the quarantine is your mitigation against such events.