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macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

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Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#251

Post by morsch »

nicky0 wrote: post #150
tannhaeuser wrote: post #108

All I want is an app that can fix the "broken window" focus management. Like when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app, and when an app (say, Finder) has no window open currently, bringing it to front also unaskedly manipulates the stacking order such that other app's windows become the top most one, completely destroying the visual context. Also, back in the days I used Expose a l…

> [Expose] has completely lost any spatial determinism Could you elaborate on that?

Not the OP, but I never know where a specific application will show up. Sometimes Chrome is on the left and my IDE is on the top right, sometimes it's the opposite. If it relates to the window location, I can't tell. Always mostly the same set of five or six applications, too.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#252

Post by rtp4me »

timrichard wrote: post #189
danielvaughn wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want a Finder that actually works. It’s pretty incredible just how bad Finder is. It’s by far the worst piece of software I’m forced to use on a daily basis.

I use Forklift instead : https://binarynights.com/ I can use it as an orthodox file manager (with the f keys I remember from Norton Commander). I also like using it to access remote filesystems over nfs and sftp, and also S3 buckets. It also works well with Dropbox and iCloud. There is a great sync feature to keep source and target directories synchronised. It's also good for diffing directories at a glance. It's goo…

Same. I tried to use Finder for a while but landed on Forklift. I consider it the best choice of file manager tools for MacOS.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#253

Post by crazygringo »

mingus88 wrote: post #107

Remember when Mac was intuitive? I dig these cheat sheets but wow, what a total shift in paradigm from when you had one mouse button and if a feature wasn’t discoverable then it wasn’t shipped

Apple has been using these non-discoverable keyboard modifiers since the very start. I remember using them with System 6 back around 1990.

Their design philosophy has always been discoverability for regular features, and then these extra "hidden" features for power users.

Nothing has changed.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#254

Post by lycopodiopsida »

n8henrie wrote: post #226
gluteart wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived with Alfred for many-many years, but Raycast seems much better this days. Simpler yet richer and constantly developed, many plugins, it's simple to do your own and... it has window manager

Development has been slow lately, but Quicksilver[0] is still around as a FOSS alternative. We have an upcoming release that should refresh things a bit for Seqouia. [0]: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver

Launchbar[0] is also still around - not actively developed, but actively maintained. Happy user since 10 years already, even though I own a lifetime Alfred license.

[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#256

Post by lycopodiopsida »

tacker2000 wrote: post #121

I remember a launcher that was kind of bare bones and didnt use spotlight for indexing, it compiled its own index, and was able to do great fuzzy searching, but I forgot the name and cant find it, anyone else have a clue?

Certainly LaunchBar as mentioned above.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#257

Post by kps »

etrautmann wrote: post #186
pindab0ter wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is so bad about Finder? I've never had any issues with it.

Things that are hard: launching a terminal at a location, viewing or copying a files path, navigating a deep file system, column width in the column view, searching for files, finding file info, and lots of other.

At least it has a column view.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#258

Post by wlesieutre »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #66
wlesieutre wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Raycast open source at all? With nearly $50M of funding (most recently $30M series B last fall) I have to wonder about the long term sustainability and whether I want to invest my time and workflows into the whims of a VC backed “free forever” plan. Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.

This is a concern of mine as well. Alfred is also just so ridiculously lightweight and efficient compared to, well, everything these days. At 18MB on disk and sitting at 0% CPU and 42MB RAM on my machine right now with no spread of support processes, it feels almost like an endangered species Tiger-era Mac app that’s managed to survive to the current day.

As much as I'd like to imagine investors are shoveling money into a pit because they want us to have nice software, the sheer amount of money feels like the only two options are (A) to reach profitability we're raising prices way up to juice the people who have become dependent on Raycast when it was affordable, or (B) blah blah incredible journey, our team is being acquihired for a sort of related project and Raycast will slowly wither and die as we realign priorities with the people who pay us.

I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#259

Post by HDThoreaun »

hibbelig wrote: post #177
nomilk wrote: post #20

Love that this is straight to the point. My tips: - Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > ), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workfl…

I used to use tiling window managers on Linux, but I found out that my Mac usage contains lots of “graphical” apps that don't like to live in a quarter of the screen or something like that. So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30%…

Why not just have all your windows fullscreen and three finger swipe between them like macOS was designed to be used. If you dont like the extremely opinionated macOS window design why not just use Linux?

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#260

Post by swat535 »

mike1o1 wrote: post #34
nomilk wrote: post #20

Love that this is straight to the point. My tips: - Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > ), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workfl…

I used to use Alfred, but I've since switched to using Raycast as I liked some of the UI integration a bit better. I recommend trying it out! https://www.raycast.com/

Looks interesting.. how does it compare to Launchbar?

https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

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