OSX Pet Peeves
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.
August 30th, 2005 at 7:50 am
have you tried textwrangler (free), from the bbedit folks? i haven’t had a chance to try it myself. i don’t know if it has all the features you need though.
August 31st, 2005 at 2:51 am
– You can download an ad blocking /etc/hosts file that will block ads in Safari.
– You can download iTerm and AdiumX to have tabs in your term and chat client.
– What? VIM is no good? Also, you can run Kate with X Windows and fink.
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 am
Hi, i know the page’s old but:
Safari has an adblocking plugin, jsut look with google, free and efficient.
ichat has seperate windows if you awnt or the one window with everything, indeed you have the choice ;)
good text editor on the mac: textmate ( you’ll need years to get all it can do )
finder and hidden files, learn to go to preferences on the mac, finder has preferences and it has one in the last tab abot hidden files ;) either command , or command j for the presentation panel
and the last one you got corrected seems weird to me, try command < or command > to switch windows ;)
Hope i could help :)
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:46 pm
There are a few ad-blockers for Safari now, though there’s nothing quite like AdBlock Plus for Firefox.
As of Leopard, iChat has tabs for conversations but you still have one window per account. e.g. If I sign on with Jabber and AIM, I get two contact lists.
I’ve been using Aquamacs Emacs since I switched.
Cmd-< / Cmd-> Doesn’t switch windows for me.