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The Mac Pro Lives

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Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#711

Post by Lio »

seansmccullough wrote: post #566
dilap wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. I use + love BetterSnapTool. Works great.

Best tool ever. The custom touchpad gestures are great, too. You can do stuff like three-finger swipe up/down to switch to previous/next tab, and rotate right/left to open/close taps.

I hardly ever use the touch gestures but BTT will let you drive everything from the keyboard. I can put windows almost anywhere at will now.

I know I'm being selfish here but it would be nice if Apple covered this sort of stuff instead of concentrating on emoji and Siri. Both of which I have no real use for.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#712

Post by yokohummer7 »

mort96 wrote: post #696
yokohummer7 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's terrible to script I'm pretty sure you didn't try PowerShell. It is at least as good as bash, if not better. > you need to use the mouse too much I find this more problematic on macOS. I was forced to use a mouse much more on macOS. It doesn't even allow me to press the yes/no dialog only using a keyboard. On Windows nearly every item has a shortcut, sometimes even better than GNOME (but worse than KDE, IMO).

I find it hard to take powershell seriously, considering last time I tried using it for anything, I just wanted to quickly download something over http. Looked for something like 'wget ' online, the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it. That's fine for a programming language, completely horrible for an everyday shell, from the perspec…

> the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it.

I blame the documentation. Not the official documentation (they're not excellent, but OK), but various outdated resources residing in many blogs and sites, including Stack Overflow. I mean, what's wrong with

  iwr REMOTE_URL -o LOCAL_FILENAME
? The situation this command wasn't searchable by you is unfortunate, possibly because PowerShell has come a long way since its introduction in 2006 and it is hard to remove the outdated resources online. But for those who know what features/commands are available in PowerShell, finding them isn't particularly difficult.

> There's also the fact that lots of stuff in windows wasn't designed to be accessible through the cli. You can't, for example, make a powershell script to toggle an audio output device on and off

This is just one example. On the other hand, I found nearly every thing I had done using GUI could be replaced by a few lines of PowerShell code. Actually automating my day-to-day GUI operations was my way to learn PowerShell, and mostly it worked great. Microsoft is adding tons of commands each release to expose more system functionalities. There are exceptions of course, but "lots of stuff" is a bit exaggerated.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#713

Post by drspacemonkey »

joemi wrote: post #667
city41 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a MacOS user from System 7 through to Yosemite. I now use Ubuntu 99% of the time (I still have a Mac that I casually use). IMO Ubuntu is now superior to OSX in almost every way. For me, Ubuntu really does "just work", and gives me a vastly better package manager, and the ability to use the i3 window manager, which has fundamentally changed how I use my computer. I am specifically saying "Ubuntu" and not "Linux"…

> IMO Ubuntu is now superior to OSX in almost every way. Out of genuine curiosity, what are the ways it's not superior?

For me, it's multi-monitor resolution scaling. OSX sets the gold standard for that.

I still prefer using Ubuntu for my dev environment, tho.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#714

Post by _acme »

joemi wrote: post #667
city41 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a MacOS user from System 7 through to Yosemite. I now use Ubuntu 99% of the time (I still have a Mac that I casually use). IMO Ubuntu is now superior to OSX in almost every way. For me, Ubuntu really does "just work", and gives me a vastly better package manager, and the ability to use the i3 window manager, which has fundamentally changed how I use my computer. I am specifically saying "Ubuntu" and not "Linux"…

> IMO Ubuntu is now superior to OSX in almost every way. Out of genuine curiosity, what are the ways it's not superior?

Out of genuine curiosity, what are the ways it is superior?

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#715

Post by wingworks »

spectistcles wrote: post #601
csomar wrote: post #178

Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a har…

I'm with you on this. The bloatware in modern operating systems, even once you take away the PC-vendor garbage, is appalling. I feel like they could keep things the way they are, and offer an AOSP-like vanilla version for people who generally know what they're doing (Google does a pretty good job with limiting it). I'd pay hundreds of dollars more for this software option (have previously considered hiring someone to…

When you get a new Windows computer first thing to do is give it clean install using an image direct from MS (remove all the partitions), which gives you a nice clean start. Don't even try to uninstall crap the OEMs have installed, there will always be stuff you've missed.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#716

Post by travelbyphone »

lemoncucumber wrote: post #432
coryfklein wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drag the icon in the top center of the window onto your text editor or terminal, it will paste the full path from the Finder window. Admittedly it's annoying that this feature is hidden and requires dragging with the mouse, but it is possible.

You can also drag any folder or file from the finder into an open or save dialog and it will take you to that folder / select that file

This is one of many features i much appreciate in Mac OS X. Active corners is another powerful features that makes window managing and file moving a bliss. I find macOS much stickier than iOS. I can go without my iPad but not without my mac.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#717

Post by _acme »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #505
m_mueller wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scripting and CLI. * Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows reg…

> * Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. To be fair, the built in Terminal.app sucks, you have to get iTerm2, which is a 3rd-party app, but at least it's not another $40 replacement app that shouldn't suck by default, (the same cannot be said for Finder and its replacements).

What is it that sucks about Terminal.app that iTerm2 fixes?

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#718

Post by nikdaheratik »

yokohummer7 wrote: post #253
Keyframe wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective: If MacOS had: up-to-date OpenGL support, Nvidia made drivers that supported new cards for it, was not locked into Mac hardware - that would be tremendous. On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. If Linux, any desktop variant (Fedora my poison), had Adobe's support for their DCC apps an…

> On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. It is PowerShell, and it really is. Until recently I thought Windows had poor CLI support, and I discovered PowerShell and now I favor it even more than bash. Am I crazy? Possibly, but PowerShell is truly a piece of gem in the CLI history. It is a thoughtfully craf…

PowerShell is very serviceable, but it has weird points of failure. Especially with some FOSS projects that seem to think cmd is the furthest they will go as far as Windows support, then they completely choke on powershell.

I think if I liked the rest of the .Net toolkit more, I'd be more enthused about it. It makes things livable on Windows, which is better than the dark days of Vista/7.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#719

Post by tintoy »

city41 wrote: post #663
yokohummer7 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. It is PowerShell, and it really is. Until recently I thought Windows had poor CLI support, and I discovered PowerShell and now I favor it even more than bash. Am I crazy? Possibly, but PowerShell is truly a piece of gem in the CLI history. It is a thoughtfully craf…

But powershell is an all or nothing proposition. At my job, the majority use OSX. I use Linux. Since we all use bash, there's very little friction here. I can't "just use powershell" in this scenario at all.

Actually that's changing - PowerShell Core works anywhere .NET Core does (including OSX and Linux).

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell#-powershell

(although that doesn't account for personal preference, of course)

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#720

Post by city41 »

tintoy wrote: post #719
city41 wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But powershell is an all or nothing proposition. At my job, the majority use OSX. I use Linux. Since we all use bash, there's very little friction here. I can't "just use powershell" in this scenario at all.

Actually that's changing - PowerShell Core works anywhere .NET Core does (including OSX and Linux). https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell#-powershell (although that doesn't account for personal preference, of course)

That does help, and is welcome. But convincing a team to switch something as fundamental as their shell is an uphill battle. I'm sure PowerShell is great (I've never used it), but shells always struck me as the kind of thing where "good enough is good enough".
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