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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

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Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#211

Post by loevborg »

mwfunk wrote: post #162
burntsushi wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am exactly the opposite and it certainly has nothing to do with fun or self-image. I can hop on to any Linux box and be just fine. But I'm comfortable in a familiar setting with my `~/bin`, aliases, editor (vim), keybindings, a few key-remappings and package manager (pacman). There's a lot of benefits that come from having precisely the same environment on my web server, home machine, laptop, media PCs and my machi…

I totally get what you're saying, I guess I just have different values (for lack of a better term) where this stuff is concerned. My ideal job would have me bouncing between different operating systems, hardware, and languages all the time. For career reasons, and just to feed my curiosity, I have a fear of getting too comfortable with any one workflow/language/OS/etc. Plus familiarity breeds contempt- every time I t…

Excuses for the off-topic question, but would you be willing to share your imdb scraper? That would be very useful to me. (My contact data is in my user profile.)

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#212

Post by 4ad »

spost wrote: post #38
4ad wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the work of Jonathan Perkin (from joyent): http://www.perkin.org.uk/ It's great. It really is. I never understood why it's not used by more people. Homebrew is simply awful.

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.

I use a macbook for the battery life and the no-hassle experience (which is getting worse everyday, but that's a different discussion). Homebrew works against these two principles in multiple ways. Compiling software takes massive amounts of time; if I need to install something I want it now, dammit. In principle, there are some binary packages too, but when I tried homebrew there were not for anything that I needed.

Apart from time, compiling software consumes energy, decreasing the autonomy of my laptop.

But those are not the main reasons I dislike homebrew so much. My main gripe is that the packages are of extremely poor quality. When I needed something, it was not compiled with the options I needed. E.g. packages were missing DTrace integration, QEMU was missing the one target I cared about etc.

I am a Go developer; you have no idea how many problems people have had with the homebrew package. It is garbage. And Go is quite trivial to package compared to other stuff. I simply gave up on helping anyone reporting a problem if he is using homebrew. I ask them to recompile Go from official source first.

And then there's the whole curl into bash things, gah I'll just stop now.

The biggest advantage of pkgsrc (apart from quality binary packages) is that I can use the same package versions, compiled exactly the same (to the extent possible) on OS X, Linux, and Solaris; and these are production-ready releases used in production by Joyent (and others) vetted by actual release engineers.

And with pkgsrc it is trivial to install from source when you need to modify a package locally (unlike, say, with apt).

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#213

Post by rcarmo »

Other than using brew (which I love and use from the outset), I would strongly advise against following this guide without understanding what it's doing. Seriously.

That's why the author says "This script should not be run without prior examination", for starters.

And the bit about having to install a new Python just to get pip when you can do it just fine with easy_install pip... rolls eyes

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#214

Post by tuananh »

tkubacki wrote: post #138
sanderjd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That's why I use Ubuntu's default Unity on desktop and OSX Macbook these days. For me it just works. Ubuntu has even more powerful window managing key bindings by default (on OSX I need Spectacle). For all other things I just don't care.

try Amethyst on OS X : )

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#216

Post by swah »

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.

A taskbar like Windows is useful to know what are your alt-tab targets, of if you need to open a new app. But good idea, I'm going to try the empty dock.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#217

Post by philbarr »

wasd wrote: post #3

Anybody have any suggestions on how to do this on a Windows PC? I like Ninite[1] a lot but I would prefer something more customizable. [1]: https://ninite.com/

I've been working on a chocolately script for next time I need to setup a windows machine. This is what I've got so far:

  @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

  # tools
  choco install dropbox
  choco install gow
  choco install googledrive

  # graphics
  choco install inkscape
  choco install colorpic
  choco install blender
  choco install gimp 

  # IDEs
  choco install eclipse
  choco install VisualStudio2012Professional

  # editors
  choco install atom
  choco install lighttable
  choco install ProgrammersNotepad

  # browsers
  choco install firefox
  choco install GoogleChrome

  # languages
  choco install jdk8
  choco install lein
  choco install groovy
  choco install python
  choco install ruby

  # build
  choco install ant
  choco install gradle
  choco install maven
  choco install puppet
  choco install wixtoolset

  # servers
  choco install nodejs.install
  choco install Tomcat

  # databases
  choco install mysql
  choco install mysql.workbench
  choco install toad.mysql


  # scm
  choco install git.install
  choco install TortoiseGit
  choco install GitHub
  choco install svn
  choco install tortoisesvn
  choco install ankhsvn

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#218

Post by dopeh »

orangecat wrote: post #165
juddlyon wrote: post #66

It's interesting to see how other folks tweak their machines, but this is a highly personal thing and you're likely to break things. The older I get, the more I leave things alone. Swim with the current.

The older I get, the more I leave things alone. Me too, but I'd never discourage anyone from tinkering. Sure you might break stuff, and that's a learning opportunity.

Definitely, but after reading some of the responses (e.g. "I ran this script but now my spotlight is missing"), I think too many people skip the learning part.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#219

Post by [deleted] »

antimagic wrote: post #186
teacup50 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because /usr/local doesn't belong to homebrew and is not appropriate for homebrew to commandeer. MacPorts was originally written by the BSD team at Apple; if /usr/local was where a packaging system was supposed to stuff itself on OS X, they would have used it -- instead of /opt/local. The co-opting of /use/local breaks all kinds of stuff -- for instance, /usr/local/lib is in the default linker search path and can't b…

I disagree. / is where the stuff needed for single-user mode gets installed. /usr is where the OS's userland stuff gets installed. On Linux systems this includes everything that you get from your package manager, because this is considered to be part of your system. /usr/local is wher you install your own packages. For example, if I'm installing something from source, that's where I'm going to install it. Or if I'm b…

[deleted]

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#220

Post by to3m »

swah wrote: post #216
dekz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A taskbar like Windows is useful to know what are your alt-tab targets, of if you need to open a new app. But good idea, I'm going to try the empty dock.

I use the empty dock too - well, nearly. I have emacs, terminal and browser on there permanently, for quick access to my 3 most-used programs. For quick access to everything else, I've got a shortcut to the Applications folder too. (Sort by Name, Display as Stack, View Content as Automatic.) To reduce clutter, you could alternatively make yourself a ~Applications folder with a reduced set of shortcuts in it, and add a shortcut to that instead.

I'm certain OS X was set up this way when I first got my computer, but I've used some people's Macs and they don't have it. So... maybe it wasn't? But anyway, default or not, it works well.

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