Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#121

Post by psophis » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:35 PM UTC

dekz wrote: post #107

swah wrote: post #46

Do any of you use Dock replacements? I'm faster with the Windows-style taskbar and uBar ( http://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar ) was the sponsor of the last episode of John Gruber's podcast.

I use a auto-hidden dock which has nothing in it. It is populated by running programs and is not used as a launcher. For launching I use a tool like Quicksilver or Alfred of Spotlight. This way I get more screen realestate, I see no point staring at a dock icons all the time. My dock resembles Command-Tab.

I'm the same way. The dock is just a quick place to look for things that I might have left open. Or opening recently downloaded items.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#122

Post by neckro23 » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:37 PM UTC

yrmt wrote: post #43

spost wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what's wrong with Homebrew? I'm just a student, not a full-time developer, but I've never had problems with it and find it pretty pleasant to use.

It's slow and it has to build the packages most of the time. pkgin will install a precompiled packages very quickly. It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.

Homebrew now has prepackaged binaries ("bottles") for most of the packages that take awhile to build, which has really helped the speed thing.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#123

Post by Igglyboo » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:44 PM UTC

yrmt wrote: post #43

spost wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what's wrong with Homebrew? I'm just a student, not a full-time developer, but I've never had problems with it and find it pretty pleasant to use.

It's slow and it has to build the packages most of the time. pkgin will install a precompiled packages very quickly. It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.

What makes C better than ruby?

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#124

Post by Igglyboo » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:50 PM UTC

jug5 wrote: post #6

Step 1. Install linux

I love linux as much as the next guy, especially on the server, but definitely not as my daily driver. It's too unpolished, especially UI/UX wise.

I'm hoping the year of the linux desktop will come eventually however.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#125

Post by aftbit » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:51 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #30

This "cool hacker settings for your Mac" script turns off your laptop's power saving features (sleep, display dimming, hibernation even though sleep was off(?)), removes at least three kinds of backups for data loss (MobileTimeMachine, Resume, hibernation file), and changes AppKit settings in a way your customers will never be using (by turning off Automatic Termination, which is pretty harmless). Please don't run sc…

It turns off hybrid sleep (where memory is written to disk when sleeping so it could eventually resume even if the battery died), as well as automatic sleep (when the lid is open). These are things I turn off 100% of the time on all of my machines.

I'm a bit dubious about the display dimming thing - I'll probably leave that on in my fork of this script.

As for Automatic Termination, I need to read more about that before I turn it _on_, not before I turn it off. :)

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#126

Post by RexRollman » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:53 PM UTC

dekz wrote: post #106

RexRollman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am absolutely no kind of programmer but I prefer to compile from source on my own, when I can. For example, the first thing I did yesterday after clean installing Yosemite Beta 4 was to compile Scrypt.

Can I perhaps ask why? Is it a trust issue that you don't like accepting a prebuilt binary from some random on the internet?

I just enjoy the control.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#127

Post by habitue » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:55 PM UTC

jug5 wrote: post #6

Step 1. Install linux

It's just, look at all this fighting you have to do to get linux tools on your mac. It's not a hacker OS by default, it's a pretty, user-friendly OS by default, and you can use homebrew and these other tools to replicate many of the features you'd get on the actual hacker OS: linux. Unless you're developing for Mac, I just don't get why it's so popular with developers.

(OK, that's not true, I get it. It's very cool looking. But I'd think more developers would get past that and see how hard they're working to turn their cool looking OS into a poor linux imitation).

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#128

Post by Artemis2 » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:56 PM UTC

ccbean wrote: post #40

After installing Mackup, the Mac backup tool mentioned in this guide, I noticed that it backed up my entire ~/.ssh directory to Dropbox. This included my id_rsa private key, which I would prefer not to have on Dropbox, even with a key passphrase.

Generate a new key now and consider the old one as compromised.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#129

Post by habitue » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 10:59 PM UTC

Igglyboo wrote: post #124

jug5 wrote: post #6

Step 1. Install linux

I love linux as much as the next guy, especially on the server, but definitely not as my daily driver. It's too unpolished, especially UI/UX wise. I'm hoping the year of the linux desktop will come eventually however.

The UX is amazing if you ignore gnome/kde etc, which are just imitations of windows and mac. I'd say the true linux UX is in tiling window managers. Just like the terminal and vim/emacs, tiling WMs have a steep learning curve and an amazing payoff where the computer becomes an extension of your will, rather than something you fight. I really recommend you try them.

That being said, they don't look pretty, but they make me so productive I just can't go back to anything else.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#130

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 11:03 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #85

astrange wrote: post #30

This "cool hacker settings for your Mac" script turns off your laptop's power saving features (sleep, display dimming, hibernation even though sleep was off(?)), removes at least three kinds of backups for data loss (MobileTimeMachine, Resume, hibernation file), and changes AppKit settings in a way your customers will never be using (by turning off Automatic Termination, which is pretty harmless). Please don't run sc…

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

This is a great analogy. In high school and college, I believe I was a Windows and then Linux "car guy". One of the things I liked when I (mostly) switched to OSX from Linux was that I no longer had to spend any time fiddling with stuff. I used to find it fun, now it just feels like there's way too many interesting things to be learning about and doing to spend any time tweaking crap on my computer!