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Comment by cfiggers | Hacker News Reader

In that podcast DHH was talking about how in Omarchy you can change the system settings, monitor setup, themes, window chrome, installed programs, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, etc. using agents. This is facilitated by Omarchy because all that stuff is dictated by text files that agents can directly interface with.

Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files. That's what he was talking about.

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You can use the ‘defaults’ CLI to manage settings files for the OS and applications.

For example: https://macos-defaults.com/

Other than being a proprietary OS that's getting more locked down every year, its disk performance is trash.

https://x.com/theo/status/2090528543746965991

Do you have a non-video, non-X summary of what he’s talking about?

I’m not watching a 31 minute video on X to figure out what this is about. Theo is another influencer who thrives on being contrarian, embellishing negative claims about things he’s not pumping right now, and trying to get everyone to ignore negative things about what he is pumping. I would not trust his judgment on topics like this without some third party benchmarks and deeper claims because the first priority of influencers in this category is to be contrarian and ride divisive topics. Being factually correct is secondary.

Lots of small fs operations on macOS is apparently rough.

I use nix on macOS and any time it's making changes to /nix/store, the Finder and fsevents processes peg cpu.

IIRC his video shows fs-heavy ops like file deltions and pnpm install taking much longer on a macbook despite better specs.

Frankly, things like the lack of a universal cmd-c/v clipboard on linux has been 1000x worse for usability than slower bulk fs.

Ah, the irony of posting "Your Mac is slowing you down" on the bloated JS hellsite that is X. That page took 10s to appear on my machine (before even thinking of rendering the video) whereas the HN front page is <1s.

> Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files.

Maybe not, but the agent can call `defaults write` too, no?

"it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files."

This is inherently untrue. A .plist in XML is nothing but text. It might be formatted text, but it is still text nonetheless, like almost every other configuration file in existence.

Technically correct but you miss the point. Human readable text (like TOML). Nobody wants to edit XML .plist files to configure their OS and apps.

Surely the LLM doesn't mind.

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