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Comment by hucker | Hacker News Reader

Although it was a bit arrogant at times, I find myself at a similar place as he seemingly was before he switched right now. I'm doing all my development on MacVim and iTerm2, which is way more smooth for me than the TextMate / Terminal.app combo I came from. I am however increasingly annoyed, like the op, by having to use my mouse at all while developing. Divvy is making window management manageable, but it's still not quite the way I want it. The package-manager-situation is just the top of the iceberg for me. I think maybe my time may have come, so to speak.

I still love Apple hardware though, which leads me to my question; what is the best distribution in terms of support of Apple hardware? Especially MacBook Pro 5,5 which is my day to day development machine for the time being.

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Out of curiosity, how does iTerm2 help you more effectively use the command-line? I've seen many people say it's better.. but the features listed on the site just don't seem to be things I need (or things more appropriately done elsewhere, e.g. my zsh does completion).

The author cites mouse events, but this is something I've never missed (and never use it when I'm working on Linux). Is that something you use? If so, what for? You use MacVim, so presumably you don't need mouse events in your terminal for vim.

I should note I don't use a vanilla Terminal.app - I use it with Visor (http://visor.binaryage.com/) to quickly invoke the command-line from anywhere, and I use MacVim as my editor.

I get what he says about package managers. MacPorts really was something I loathed. I recently discovered homebrew and "breath of fresh air" covers it exactly.

Well, for one, with iTerm2 I don't have to use visor, the app itself handles this. To be totally honest with you though, iTerm1/2 over Terminal.app hasn't really been that big of a change, I mostly like the improved key-settings and the theming. What motivated that change was that I was having a lot of trouble with getting the modifier keys do what I wanted, as strange as that sounds. Changing to iTerm just fixed it, and I liked what I saw, so there never was any reason for me to go back and figure out what I did wrong.

The biggest change by far for me was going from TextMate to MacVim/vim, which has boosted my programming speed immensely (after the usual month of pure frustration and all development grinding to a near halt).

Hardware support in Linux is heavily tied to the state of the kernel that your distribution uses. Newer kernels generally have better support for newer hardware.

I am not aware of any distribution which is better or quicker at patching their kernel to fix Apple-related issues, so I suspect that your mileage will be about the same using most distros, especially as your MBP is not particularly new.

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