Well, as some of you know, I’ve a Mac workstation now. It’s a pretty nice system; dual-1.8ghz Power Mac G5, with a nice 20″ Cinema LCD display. I’ve been using Linux on my desktop forever, so this is a pretty drastic change for me.
Overall, I like it, but there are some things that are pretty irritating.
- No ad blocking in Safari. Not a huge deal, since Firefox is plenty quick, but an annoyance to be sure.
- iChat. iChat is neat, but it needs a lot more work. Someone decided that it should have different windows for different types of accounts, which is insanely dumb. Also, Jabber does not work at all well behind a firewall – connections drop constantly, and file transfer doesn’t work.
- Tabs aren’t as prevalent as in KDE. In KDE everything is tabbed. I miss tabs in my IRC/IM clients, Terminal, and text editor.
- Speaking of text editors, there is no decent free programmer’s editor. Kate is just about perfect – full-featured without being too heavy. Xcode is nice, but too heavy; CVS/SVN doesn’t work unless you create a project. BBEdit looks comparable to Kate, but $130?! No way.
- Safari encoding weirdness. I set the default encoding to UTF-8 – which, I think, is what it should be anyways – but the setting overrides the page’s encoding, which means you get ?s all over the place on non-UNICODE pages. Dumb.
- Finder has no setting to display hidden files. TinkerTool allows you to change that, but that’s clumsy. Stupid.
- Inconsistency when switching between apps and app windows. E.g. Xcode and Xcode windows containing files. Command-tab only switches through focused app windows, e.g. the last used file in Xcode. It does not cycle through all windows on the desktop. This is dumb because it’s inconsistent.
and because there are no universal hotkeys to switch windows inside an app, making it difficult/impossible to get back to the window you want with the keyboard. Exposé helps, but this is still dumb. Edit: Command-` switches between app windows.
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