Posts tagged: MACOS

Here’s an odd bug in OS X’s Mail.app: if the cursor is either at the beginning or the end of a message you’re composing, and you press the keyboard shortcut for “Transpose characters” (ctrl-T) the application spontaneously quits.

Bummer!

Caution – don’t idly test this out right now if you have an unsaved message open. I know it’s tempting.

MacFixit has a suggested workaround – use ~/Library/DefaultKeyBindings.dict to disable the key – but it’s not ideal since ctrl-T has valid uses in other applications, like invoking spellcheck in Pico or Nano. Unless you tend to hit ctrl-T accidentally, I’d just leave it alone and wait for the inevitable patch from Apple.

There are almost as many unix software packaging systems as there are flavors of unix – Debian’s APT, FreeBSD’s ports, Red Hat’s RPM, Gentoo’s portage, et al. Under OS X or Darwin, the two main contenders are DarwinPorts and Fink. I used Fink for a long time, but switched to DarwinPorts last year in one of my periodic retoolings, and found I liked it better. My reasons are intangible; my gut tells me that only one of these systems is going to be “the one,” and that it’s going to be DP. Mostly that just means I like the feel of it. It has fewer packages than Fink (2800 vs. about 5000), but seems to be gaining.

I’ve always wanted to like AppleScript more. Even though I’ve occasionally been paid to write AppleScript code, and always have a few little snippets gluing parts of my work environment together, I’ve never really gained facility with it. I’ve always summarized its flaws this way: It’s very easy to read for general sense, but damn hard to write. Sort of the inverse of Perl – which, probably not coincidentally, is the world’s most popular glue language. So while this characteristic of AppleScript may have been a conscious decision on the part of its designers, I’d argue it hasn’t served us all that well. (I’d also argue that Automator is a partial acknowledgement of those failings.) John Gruber of Daring Fireball sums it up nicely in his recent posting:

Another in a weekly series of unearthings.

Two years ago my titanium PowerBook died and I took an unplanned six-week leave from OS X. Afterward I wrote up my experiences in an essay called “FreeBSD, KDE and Me” (you might miss the title reference if you’re not of a certain generation). Within 24 hours the essay had gotten about 10,000 page views – easily the most popular thing I had ever posted.

Matisse Enzer’s Unix for Mac OS X Tiger is on its way to bookshelves near you. This is a complete overhaul of the previous edition, which covered 10.3. For the GUI-centric Mac user curious about the command line, this is a great book to own. Matisse is another Well denizen, and I’ve followed his progress on the book with interest. Also see his blog entry on the book’s release.