osx transition notes
Coming back to OSX after years away in linux has been mostly positive.
The things that annoy me are still a bother, but knowing what they are has helped me think of them as more of a joke. Not that it's funny per-say, but thinking of it as funny helps me deal with it.
Other things are pretty great - there are some nice things that make me very happy to work with the hardware. I do enjoy deving on OSX - it's not as unreasonable as it might have been. This is mostly thanks to a few nice tools, some patience, and of course, the clojure repl.
Mentality
> Uncompromising
In the past, I've rolled over a bit to work in the walled garden. That was when I was learning to dev, and already integrated into OSX.
Arch unlocked me - moving to arch opened me up - it would never have occured to
me that you can just write a script for that. Somehow Apple taking care of me
prevented me from taking the next step into automating and owning my own
computer - it was always theirs. (If you're reading this on OSX, I'm sorry, but
you'll have to run a system upgrade before you can read the rest of the article.)
Now that I've been away for a while, I want to come back and achieve a workflow as close as possible to what I have on linux.
That means the same keybindings, the same workspaces. The same UI?
>> There are of course, exceptions
>>> emacs crashes (everywhere) when a full screen window is closed
So I just don't use full-screen emacs. I didn't use this on linux, but thought it might be interesting on OSX, especially for a small screen.
Bad things
> homebrew
For better or worse, we can't quite get away from it.
On Manjaro/Arch I use `yay`. The experience is roughly the same, just a little worse around the edges.
I should be more specific here...
> Emacs server (via brew services)
On linux i'm accustomed to running daemons with systemd, and logging them with journald. There are imperfections, but at least it feels maleable, and I'm quite used to it.
Brew services tries to stand in for this, but it takes no responsibilty for logging - good luck figuring out where your service's logs end up.
> Alfred vs Rofi
Alfred is great, but quite different from Rofi - this caught me off guard. I now make extensive use of Rofi in Clawe, and was excited to get back to Alfred, thinking it would unlock more fun.
It turns out there's no command line interface to Alfred at all - you can't pass a list of items into it and get a selection back out. Instead, you have to wire everything up through their UI, and which is quite limited in terms of entry points. Pretty frustrating after working with Rofi for a few years! Alfred feels inacessible from shell tooling/other apps. Maybe it integrates well with them, but not vice-versa.
I found a minimal alternative ( choose ) that's not too much code - maybe it's worth learning more about, or starting to build up features on top of.
> Ctrl vs Cmd Keybindings
I'd like basic linux and osx keybindings ones to pretty much match:
- ctrl+c/x/v for copy/cut/paste everywhere...
- ctrl+r to reload the browser
- whatever the open dev-tools binding is
You can kind of get there - apple lets you overwrite existing keybindings on a per-app basis, with a strange match-on-exact-string settings bit. At this point I'm still discovering copy/pastes/etc that don't work and require some mixing.
> Modifier Key locations
I've finally got the modifier keys to match the linux machine, which is, from
left to right: Ctrl, Fn, Cmd, Opt/Alt
You can remap things without much trouble:
Fn -> Ctrl
Ctrl -> Fn
Cmd -> Opt
Opt -> Cmd
Getting opt/cmd to be opt/alt in emacs and in alacritty was a bizzaro journey - it's likely others will find the solution faster, but I'll document the specifics here.
>> TODO how use opt as meta in emacs on osx
something like:
(setq mac-command-modifier 'super
ns-command-modifier 'super
mac-option-modifier 'meta
ns-option-modifier 'meta
mac-right-option-modifier 'meta
ns-right-option-modifier 'meta)>> TODO how use opt as alt in alacritty on osx (for tmux)
some alacritty on this: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/62
> Notifications
Vs my linux api, this notifications thing needs a safer wrapper - can't
handle anything that's not a string
> Downloading Xcode
This takes a hilariously long time, regardless of your internet speed. I'm talking multiple hours. I found out a bit later there are existing workarounds for this - I was naively installing via the App Store, which is single-threaded or throttled or just still on the MVP implementation I guess.
> Messages
I can't believe I can't send a screenshot from the messages UI. I very commonly take a screenshot and then go to send it to someone. I suppose the expected flow is working with the temp-floating-screenshot popup (fancy-shmancy). If i want to Message someone a screenshot or other file, I can't do it through Messages - instead you go hunt down the file in the finder and interact with it that way. I get it, but it's frustrating to be trapped in Messages with no obvious way to pop the finder open.... eventually i realize i can do so through alfred...
My flow is from years of Slack usage.
> Finder sorting (of screenshots, and other non-zero-padded file names)
The default screenshot date format (can this even be changed?) does not sort chronologically in the finder. The times aren't zero-padded, and they aren't military time, so your 11 pm screenshot is grouped with your 11 am and 1pm ones.
>> TODO change default screenshot date format
> Apple Script/obb
Getting all my safari urls is still somehow elusive. Possibly b/c I'm creating multiple safari instances?
Good things
> Battery Life
I can take this to a coffee shop/bar, and leave the power cord at home, and sit anywhere.
> Form factor, keyboard, yada yada
I'm not too picky about this, but it's better to have keys than the touch bar, and it feels nice to type on.
> Fancy: Unlocking with finger/touch or apple watch
Reluctantly, this is fairly impressive
> Yabai
Yabai is pretty great - the instructions/install was not easy, but it is pretty smooth once you're through it.
Notes re: SIP and security, yada yada
>> Bad: Yabai drops labels when restarting
I get it, and other WMs do this too...
Holding onto workspaces is an important feature, but WMs seem to leave that one to user-land.
Either your startup script needs to be implemented such that it recreates workspaces (which is typical, I'm reluctant to admit), or you otherwise need to save and restore state yourself.
>>> TODO how do i do this in clawe/yabai now?
> Bluetooth
Very solid, works perfectly. Crushes the linux experience, which is more like an eventual stability full of dragons, drivers, and :fingers-crossed: system updates.
> Messages
It's nice to be able to text from the computer again!
> Apple Script/obb
Things like dialogs are fairly nice to have, and for not too much effort.
Transitioning strategy
> Emacs first
So we can read and write working notes
Helps to stay focused and keep track of rabbit holes
Stack-popping
Writing is thinking
> Global keybindings
shift+enter for a working terminal
shift+cmd+enter for a working emacs
Ideally these would toggle
> Togglable apps
So we can pop the browser/journal in and out while debugging
>> Poor man's toggle first
yabai actually makes this quite simple
>> Clawe scratchpad toggle
For when you want things to 'just work' on one keybinding
Note the performance trade-offs. Yabai could be quicker out of the box, tho it seems possible to write the clawe config in such a way that it's smarter and the performance is unnoticable. Maybe some fancy db caching?
TODO next: finish gathering content from linked notes
There are just a few outliers - most of the content is from that first week, so
the more 'recent' links (things like breaking upgrades, gcc issues, etc)
Backlinks
Rather unfortunate finding when transitioning to osx - none of my rofi tooling translates to alfred.
I could be missing something here! I really struggled to make progress in their docs, may not have found the right resource.
Sunday Funday
A rofi -for-osx tool.
During my transition to osx, this was an excellent find after coming to terms with Alfred 's lack of CLI interface.
I've built up tools and gone through many versions of this over the years. It shifts around from time to time, but here i want a place to emphasize some lessons.
Starting early today (12:01am)
working through clawe.org, pulling in some content, writing some new ideas
garden tending