I used to use two mostly-identical Macs runing OS X, one at the home and one on the office. Now that laptop hard drives have become so large, I've switched to doing everyone on my laptop and hooking it to big screens when I'm at home or at the office.
I put this page together to share my experience in getting my Mac into the shape I like; hopefully it save some other folks some time. Here you will findome notes to help make your OS X machine lean and mean (well, not so lean, but definitely mean). Anytime I need to set up a new Mac, I run through the notes on this page to make sure I've covered everything.
Alas, the dock has turned into a confusing pseudo-3D mess, and the little black arrows that used to indicated what applications are running have turned into little glowing orbs that are difficult to see against the reflective dock. A couple of lines from an arstechnica column restores it to sanity:
% defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
% killall Dock
I recommend installing the Xcode developer's tools, available on the Leopard install disk. Even if you never do any programming yourself, sometimes various package installers will want to use its facilities.
OS X's GUI has become rather bloated with superfluous animation. I recommend going into the Dock settings in the System Preferences and setting the "Minimizing using" to "Scale Effect" and turning off "Animate opening applications."
This "open" command is pretty flexible. It basically simulates a double-click. If you give it a folder or application, it will open that folder or application. "open -a application file" opens a file in the specified application, and "open http://website" opens a website in the default browser. "open -e file" will open the file in TextEdit.
Be sure to "show status bar" (under "View") in Safari.
Note: The rest of the information in this section is old. I now login to remote shells via the "New Remote Connection..." feature of the Terminal.
You can put custom commands in the Applications menu in Apple's X11. I like to customize Terminal (in the X11 menu, not Apple's Terminal program) like this:
xterm -sl 1000 -sb -rightbar
I also like to set up custom commands to log into different machines, for instance, a Bigzilla command which executes
xterm -sl 1000 -sb rightbar -title bigzilla -e ssh bigzilla.ece.gatech.edu
You can edit the customizations directly by modifying the text file
/Users/lanterma/Library/Preferences/com.apple.x11.plist
(Clicking on the above link will show you my X11 customization file.)
I used to use a Carbon version of Emacs by Mindlube from mindlube.com/products/emacs/index.html. I've since switched to Aquamacs, which is much much much nicer - it adds a lot of Mac interface conventions on top of Emacs.
It is set up as an OS X Application, meaning you can just double-click on it. The menus show up along the very top of the screen as in a usual Mac application. I like putting Emacs in the Application folder and also dragging it to the Dock for fast access.
The Emacs that comes standard with Mac OS X is a non-fancy version that doesn't know about mice and other such things. To be able to run the fancy Jaguar version you downloaded from the command line, you need to do something like the following from a Terminal or xterm:
cd /usr/bin % find the standard boring Emacs
sudo mv emacs emacs_old % move it elsewhere
and make a new file called "emacs" (also need to use sudo to be able to edit files in /usr/bin, i.e. "sudo vi emacs") containing:
#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"
Then do
sudo chmod a+x emacs
so it's runnable as a script.
Now when you type Emacs from the command line, it brings up the cool Panther version of Emacs.
(setq auto-mode-alist
(cons '("\\.tex\\'" . latex-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(define-key esc-map "G" 'goto-line)
You can type Escape, capital-G, and then a line number to quickly go to a specific line. Also, putting in this line will make it automatically put different syntatic features in different colors for LaTex, C, HTML, whatever...
(global-font-lock-mode 1)
-->
I was able to get the Matlab 7 to talk to the campus license server with no problem (I never could with the older versions of Matlab.)
# source /sw/bin/init.sh
alias clean='rm -f *~ *# *.aux *.blg *.log *.dvi'
#note you don't want to this script to
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export DISPLAY=:0.0
export EDITOR=/usr/bin/mate
export TERM=xterm-color
export CLICOLOR=true
export LSCOLORS=exfxcxdxbxegedabagacad
alias ls='ls -G'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
#delete the aux files; latex needs this available
#on multiple passes!
lt() {
if [ -e "$@".tex ]; then
latex "$@"
bibtex "$@"
latex "$@"
dvips -G0 -Ppdf -o "$@".ps "$@".dvi
rm -f "$@".dvi
ps2pdf "$@".ps
rm -f "$@".ps "$@".blg "$@".log
open "$@".pdf
else
echo "file does not exist"
fi
}