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“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

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Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#151

Post by Fnoord »

stavros wrote: post #117
sjackso wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative to escape in vi and vi-alikes: control-[ I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards. I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it s…

Map Caps Lock to both! Tap is Esc, hold is Ctrl.

I got that working with Karabiner Elements but how do people get this to work on Windows and Linux?

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#152

Post by jeremyjh »

jamesbfb wrote: post #143

I recently saved an old (2012) Mac Pro from the trash at work. As a lockdown project, I decided to do the rejuvenate the thing, thing. Cleaned it up, wiped and put a fresh copy of High Sierra on it. I am a long time Linux guy and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s almost fun to use! That said, I believe High Sierra is the last release before things start getting...weird? My wife has a newer Mac (cannot remember the rel…

I haven't really had a problem getting anything done in Big Sur on my 2017 Macbook. Before my Macbook I had a Lenovo X1 Carbon with Arch and KDE; I really loved that setup but there are several conveniences with Macs. I prefer Excel to LibreOffice for example, and I like messaging integration with iPhone and all of the applications I use are really nice; I always felt like there were a few apps on Linux that were not well designed and I had to use them anyway. But, Arch has such a great package management system. You can easiy revert to any previous version of a package, you can quickly do a binary search to find which package broke you after an update etc. Homebrew is a total garbage fire. A couple weeks ago I typed "brew upgrade git" and it upgraded the version of every homebrew package on my system. My Postgres database wouldn't start because my databases had to be upgraded. I had a deadline... Also for some reason I'm more likely to run into build problems with certain native packages. I'm really on the fence about what my next computer will be.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#153

Post by robertoandred »

jamesbfb wrote: post #143

I recently saved an old (2012) Mac Pro from the trash at work. As a lockdown project, I decided to do the rejuvenate the thing, thing. Cleaned it up, wiped and put a fresh copy of High Sierra on it. I am a long time Linux guy and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s almost fun to use! That said, I believe High Sierra is the last release before things start getting...weird? My wife has a newer Mac (cannot remember the rel…

To open unsigned software, right click, click Open, and click Open on the dialog that pops up. That’s for High Sierra and newer releases.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#154

Post by zerocrates »

andrew_ wrote: post #135
wk_end wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how basically the same thing happened to Apple in the 90s: the original, more radical successor to System 7 was in development for years under the name Copland, before they ended up scrapping most of it and releasing the much more conservative MacOS 8. Although I guess the only real takeaway might be that OS development is hard.

I had a WindowBlinds theme that mimicked the Copland look back in the day.

What did Copland look like? Some quick googling seems to show me something that looks basically like how I remember Mac OS 8.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#155

Post by wildrhythms »

LennyWhiteJr wrote: post #83
Imnimo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!

Remap caps lock to escape.

+1 One of my most impactful "ergonomic" changes I've made!

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#156

Post by mustacheemperor »

walrus01 wrote: post #78
drcongo wrote: post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

OEMs also shipped Vista on laptops with as little as 256MB of RAM, where the silly thing was immediately deep into swap space (on a slow 4200 or 5400 rpm 2.5" spinning hard drive) immediately after booting. It was the most excruciating experience.

And on the other hand 4GB or more of ram would require Vista 64bit, which today remains the most crash-prone and unstable leaky bucket of an operating system I’ve ever been subjected to, at least in the first year of release.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#157

Post by arn »

Ashanmaril wrote: post #71
nindalf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With any luck the Touch Bar is on its way out. The M1 MacBook Air doesn’t have it and is honestly a better laptop for that sole reason.

That was mostly based off the base-model 13" MacBook Pro from before which didn't have a touchbar.

There are legit rumors that Apple is specifically killing the Touch Bar as well.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#158

Post by Verdex »

Imnimo wrote: post #80
drcongo wrote: post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!

I'm curious, with a macbook do the right thing if you plug in a USB keyboard?

I'm not suggesting you just use a USB keyboard instead (although, now that I say it, that does seem like a solution).

What I'm actually wondering is how much work it would be just to create a single button that's an escape key on a USB stick that implements the USB keyboard protocol (but only ever reports that the escape key was hit).

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#159

Post by waych »

sjackso wrote: post #105
Imnimo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!

Alternative to escape in vi and vi-alikes: control-[ I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards. I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it s…

Also the Alt key + letter keys produces a series of key codes prefixed by escape, so one can use any single letter normal-mode command with the Alt key, resulting in "Escape"+. This is convenient to quickly switch to e.g. moving the cursor with e.g. `Alt+j` to both escape from insert mode back to normal mode _and_ move down a line.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#160

Post by dilyevsky »

brailsafe wrote: post #100
ydnaclementine wrote: post #61

Naive question, today can you work at microsoft as use a mac for development on the job? (non windows specific development of course) I think about how if you work at apple, you're probably strongly pushed to not use an android phone (I'm sure some exist). Compared to google, you could probably use either android or ios (even with google "owning" android), or mac, windows, or their own flavor of ubuntu for developmen…

I've heard accounts from some Google devs that Windows machines became quite scarce once Bing was caught scraping Google search. Not totally sure if that was true or not.

Windows machines at goog were banned in relation to entirely different event (hint: mostly to do with its dogshit security)
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