I do my best to not change defaults on systems that I use. It ends up being a pain point any time I go to some other computer and have to deal with my extensions/customizations not being there. Something needs to be a big productivity gain to merit the change (or else be a trivial modification, like disabling caps lock).
Sensible macOS Defaults
111–120 of 182 posts
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compare how much time you spend using your own system vs others'.
If you learn the default, it doesn't matter how much time you spend on any given system. I don't get why people make themselves less portable by becoming dependent on non-defaults.
Who is this mythical person jumping between tons of computers? Who is dependent? The few times you're on a different computer you just deal and fallback to the mean.
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#113I love that this document takes inscrutable OS X settings and translates them into familiar human-readable settings. I have no idea what "NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode" is, but I understand what "Expand save panel by default" means. However, like other people, I'm not sure that I agree with this particular set of changes. Is there a project somewhere that packages these options into a GUI? I know…
> Is there a project somewhere that packages these options into a GUI?
There was: Secrets* was both a website were people aggregated a small database of these options and a MacOS preference pane which displayed these:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150515104503/http://secrets.bl...
https://blog.taylormcgann.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/sec...
(* by the makers of Quicksilver!)
Sadly the project stopped updating in 2012 and the website, repository and forks seem all long gone.
(Should anyone resurrect this great app, one improvement should be versioning of secrets recipes. AFAIR Secrets.prefPane displayed options long after they stopped applicable for later Mac OS versions.)
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you learn the default, it doesn't matter how much time you spend on any given system. I don't get why people make themselves less portable by becoming dependent on non-defaults.
The default is reaching to the top left corner of the keyboard. I know the default and it's terrible if someone uses vim. In macOS it's trivial to remap the caps lock key to ESC system wide through the built in preferences. So while it's not that way out the box, it's certainly in the realm of default configurations any user might make on their machine.
I can't really understand picking an editor that is so awkward that it relies on me reconfiguring my hardware and breaking the labelling of the keys to make it usable.
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because if you ever run into a problem where your computer doesn't turn on, the startup sound is your first indicator of whether the screen is faulty, or the board is faulty.
It's a Mac. "whether the screen is faulty, or the board is faulty" have the same fix.
Among the many differences, if the screen is faulty, one can plug in an external monitor, and: get files off, perform a backup, use the computer, and so on and so forth.
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#116This is part of the reason I switched to Linux. I've heard so many people say "Linux is free only if you don't value your time" and then turn around and write one of these. If I'm going to go through the trouble of customizing an operating system to fit my needs, I may as well do it with a free and open system rather than MacOS, which can change for the worse at any moment (the dealbreaker for me was dropping 32 bit…
"the dealbreaker for me was dropping 32 bit support"
Funny. I decided to drop Ubuntu Linux because they dropped support for 32 bit CPUs. I switched to FreeBSD.
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#117Disabling natural-direction scrolling isn't sensible. It's the first thing I fix on all other OSes. Why should the content go the opposite direction of the way I'm moving my finger? This is one of the best fixes Apple ever made, back in Lion. Kudos to them to seeing the everyday and noticing that it was wrong.
This is configurable almost everywhere it is encountered, and there's a reason for that!
It's the same dilemma as panning a first-person-perspective camera up and down. Some people think that down should move the perspective, some people think that down should move the camera: so pushing the joystick down should move the viewing window up. These physical intuitions are durable and hard to change.
I grimly endured the difference between a trackpad and a phone until OS X (as it was then known) switched to the "correct" default, but I'm one of those people who expects a camera to work like the control stick of a plane: pulling towards me, or down, should elevate the perspective. I purchased a gimbal recently, and was having a terrible time controlling it until I realized that the default (pushing the joystick up points the camera up) could be overridden.
I don't think there's anything "sensible" in a general way about anyone's custom configuration script, frankly, and I suspect the person who made this wasn't actually trying to promote it for public consumption, and just meant "script to make my computer do what I consider sensible".
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I set my caps lock up to be escape Which was the only sensible thing to do when Apple dropped the ESC key ;) I'm so used to caps == ESC now, it takes me a minute to realize what's wrong when I'm on a new system/keyboard.
Cap locks should be control the way god intended it! :) You can use the hidutil if you want to script changes yourself: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2450... Or Karabiner Elements: https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/blob/master/R... I have an Filco Japanese keyboard and the default settings on macOS even when the keyboard is set to Japanese (QWERTY JIS) gets the 英数 (alphanumeric)…
Word of warning: hidutil keeps the caps lock delay, so you’ll miss short presses. This drove me mad until I figured it out but by then Karabiner had thankfully been updated for the new OS.
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#119Disabling natural-direction scrolling isn't sensible. It's the first thing I fix on all other OSes. Why should the content go the opposite direction of the way I'm moving my finger? This is one of the best fixes Apple ever made, back in Lion. Kudos to them to seeing the everyday and noticing that it was wrong.
This opinion betrays a lack of imagination. There are two equally valid subjective choices here: - does moving your finger up "grab the content" under the glass and move it up, or - does moving your finger up "grab the window", moving it up along a long virtual document? Both are legit mental models, it's a preference.
This would make sense if the choices were equal and opposite. They're not, though, since the advent of smooth scrolling.
Re: Sensible macOS Defaults
#120How does one find all of these "defaults" settings? Is there a reference somewhere?
Reversing the binary to find calls to NSUserDefaults/CFPreferences.