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Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

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Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#431

Post by raihansaputra »

Hamuko wrote: post #343
m463 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think newer versions of mac os x might have messed with your font rendering again. They turned off subpixel anti-aliasing and it looks worse on older displays. (I can't help but think of the "slowing down older iphones" thing) search for "fix blurry fonts mojave"

I managed to fix the font rendering on my Mojave Hackintosh, but everything is still fucked on my 16-inch MacBook Pro running Catalina.

Honestly, on the high-dpi MacBooks (my 2015 13" rMBP and the 16" MBP), I decided to run 100% rendering (which needs to be done with Retina Display Manager). Chrome on 150% default zoom, and VSCode on zoomed in + shortcut to +/- font size easily. Most other electron based apps (Spotify/Todoist) zooms pretty well too. Pixel alignment with round scaling means much better font rendering. UI elements are a bit too small though. But worth the tradeoff to me.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#433

Post by a-p-o »

eddyg wrote: post #102

Using the Touch Bar to adjust volume, brightness, etc. doesn’t have to be a two-step process... no need to tap, lift and re-position your finger to the slider that appears. Instead, just touch-and-hold the icon of the thing you want to adjust, and slide from there.

You can also increment/decrement by one by quickly swiping your finger to the right or left.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#434

Post by IgorPartola »

DrJokepu wrote: post #191
egypturnash wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is a list somewhere around Apple of "Annoying Edge Cases We'd Have To Support If Smart Folders Worked At The Filesystem Level", and how long it is. Like, you're in a smart folder that contains files whose name includes "foo", and you try to create a file whose name does not include "foo", what happens? Do you get an existing filesystem error? Do you get a new "can't create new files in smart folders…

Also, duplicate filenames due to two files in two different locations both getting picked up by the smart folder.

You can easily tack on a random ID to the file name in that case and since it would just be a symlink it wouldn’t matter.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#435

Post by IgorPartola »

aunty_helen wrote: post #406
mi_lk wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Cmd-b search in spotlight but it went with Firefox+Google when my default is Firefox+Duckduckgo, any chance someone knows how to fix it?

So, I've been messing around with this for about 30 minutes now. I don't like giving bad advice! Set safari as your default, set the search engine you want in the safari preferences, change your browser back to what you prefer.

Props for the follow up!

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#436

Post by IgorPartola »

Might be mentioned below but:

In the terminal you can use pbcopy and pbpaste to use your clipboard: cat my.txt | pbcopy.

In the terminal you can use the open command to open a file or a folder in finder: open . and open foo.pdf.

Double tap the window frame to maximize it correctly (not to a new screen and not just on one axis but the way Windows maximize works).

Multiple virtual desktops and swiping between them with gestures.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#439

Post by juancn »

egypturnash wrote: post #131
donatj wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been sad since they were introduced that they don’t work at the file system level, hence not in CLI applications. Support for them in desktop apps that open directories is also spotty. I would LOVE them if they were reimplemented as a fuse style file system instead of a userland macOS trick.

I wonder if there is a list somewhere around Apple of "Annoying Edge Cases We'd Have To Support If Smart Folders Worked At The Filesystem Level", and how long it is. Like, you're in a smart folder that contains files whose name includes "foo", and you try to create a file whose name does not include "foo", what happens? Do you get an existing filesystem error? Do you get a new "can't create new files in smart folders…

I think it would be relatively easy to write a MacFUSE driver that uses the mdfind APIs to provide a fake directory of symlinks to the actual files. I might give it a shot. Sounds like a nice side project.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#440

Post by juancn »

throwaway333444 wrote: post #8

Setting most (but not all) system preference using the terminal. It made doing clean installs every year so much easier. https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos

Why do you do clean installs? I've been moving the same MacOS image since 2006. Four machines, without any issues using whatever MacOS provides at the time.
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