Making macOS Behave Itself
danmackinlay.name
danmackinlay.name
1. Why can't windows remember their positions when using multiple screens? Is it a bug in the OS or a bug in the App (because some apps seem to work better than others?)
2. Why does Finder search suck so bad? I generally find it easier to drop to a command line and use 'find' rather than use Finder. Finder in general kinda sucks.
3. Why doesn't the Always Open With option on the Other... submenu seem to work?
4. Why does Exposé not work half the time? I have many applications with many windows open for each. I don't want to use Mission Control to select the window, I want to use Exposé. Half the time Exposé just gives me the desktop. Not what I want.
Parallels decided to install Windows Media Player as my media player for all music and video file types on macOS and I want to reset all of them to VLC.
You can.
Right Click -> Open With -> Other... (Always open with checkbox)
is for setting a particular association for the particular file you right-clicked (maybe you always want this file to open in Sublime, but this other one with the same extension in TextEdit, for some reason, etc).
command-I to open the Get Info pane -> expand Open With block -> use dropdown labelled "Use this application to open all documents like this one" -> click Change All... button
is the bulk edit flow
On Windows you can do things like set an application for all media files. Or choose which file types that VLC supports that it should open.
On macOS you have to modify every single file type by hand - which also requires a file of that type to operate on. It should be in System Preferences instead.
The files don't need to be valid, just have the extension you want to associate, so you can do something like `touch _.mp3 _.mp4 _.m4a _.mkv` then select those files and set them all at once.
#3 I think that only applies to the current file, not its type. Use the info pop up for that.
#4 generally seems to be linked to certain apps creating windows in “unusual” ways. Quit apps till the culprit is found.
(In case it’s unclear: not defending the design choices, just suggesting.)
Windows 7 also had a fantastic search mechanism in its Start Menu (although it came 4 years after Tiger's Spotlight) that has since been broken in Windows 8 and 10 for reasons unknown.
I do configure Finder to start its search in the current folder because that is usually where I want to start searching for a file and I want to limit the number of possible false positives. It’s easy to expand the search if needed.
I have heard of people who force Spotlight to reindex their drive if they are having trouble with getting results. Have you tried doing that?
I normally run spotlight from the looking glass icon in the menu bar so there is no 'current folder'. What happens is that it turns up a whole ton of XML files, dat file etc instead of the files I'm looking for. They appear only later and at the end.
In the beginning it had much more sense to keep that stuff out. And yeah I can exclude folders but I don't really want to have to micromanage that stuff. The whole point of Spotlight was not having to do that.
It'll change your life when it comes to searching on your local machine. Mind you just for files. It does not index tags nor metadata.
Apple's Open Scripting Architecture is something like 30 years old at this point. Macs have been scriptable using JavaScript for more than 20 years (JavaScript OSA, 2001), and JXA has been included in macOS since 2013.
AppleScript may have been something of a failure, but HyperTalk (which it was based on) was a huge success.
Personally I like AppleScript, even if I mainly use Python (and occasionally JavaScript) for scripting macOS and iOS. Now I want to try Late Night Software's Script Debugger 8, which looks like a nice IDE for AppleScript.
I wish Apple had better developer documentation in general.
It seems to have taken a downturn recently even as they have accelerated feature velocity with things like SwiftUI.
1. Me: Clicks on .py file ... MacOS: "Please update XCode with 13GB of patches..."
2. Me: Tries to run "gdb" ... MacOS: "Please create a manual certificate to debug your C code..."
It takes forever, but it really shouldn't. It only seems to get installed to provide a compiler. Why does that take an hour?
`apt install gcc` takes a minute.
Yes, it's absurd that you need a third-party application to install Xcode.
My second gripe is about how you can use the keyboard instead of the mouse to activate some but not all buttons in the OS. For example, Shift + Option + Backspace in finder lets you clear the trash. It pops up a window asking you to confirm, and you hit enter and off it goes. Now try renaming a bunch of files in finder. You can't even use TAB to navigate to the RENAME option to select it. Nooo... you must use the clicky thing.
Contexts solves my #1 annoyance with macOS.
(I've never used Linux.) What's wrong with it? Just not what you're used to, or you're used to something better?
It's annoying, but it totally goes to shit when you start using multiple spaces/desktops. Now cmd-tab sometimes switches to applications that aren't even open on your desktop (or sometimes it switches to other desktops). Just a total disaster of an interface.
On top of this, fullscreened windows go to some ephemeral desktop/space, which confuses the heck out of new users. I cannot believe that the Mac interface is considered "clean" or "well thought out."
Q. What do you do on Linux instead of having to remember "whether you're switching to a different application (cmd-tab), or a different window of the same application (cmd-` ???)" ? I don't know the way you're used to doing it, so it's impossible for me to assess your claims.
> On top of this, fullscreened windows go to some ephemeral desktop/space
I'd never CMD-TABed a fullscreened window before - not sure why you would want to do that, and I very rarely use fullscreen - so I never came across that! Tried doing it now - yeah, I had no idea where my fullscreen CMD-TABed firefox went or how to get it back (although New Tab worked)... So I googled it: under System Preferences->Keyboard->Mission Control->Shortcuts there are 3 shortcuts for move space right, left and go to desktop 1, which I activated, so if that ever happens I will hopefully remember what to do. Thanks, I learnt something :-)
You can group windows from the same app too, if you've got lots of windows open.
Also, my long-time mac-using SO tells me she used to use spaces but found them counterproductive, so turned them off altogether, so maybe that's a good idea for people who run into problems with them when moving to macs.
Old reply, which assumed this was a keyboard shortcut app:
Does it consistently work across all apps? Because I've gone the way of manually configuring keyboard shortcuts, but it seems like I have to do it in several places, and some apps still misbehave (particularly navigating through text with CTRL, shift, pgup, pgdown, home, end)
It's lists like these that remind me that I have sanded off a lot of the rough edges in MacOS to make it so comfortable, and those who are unwilling/unable or don't know how can be met with frustration from MacOS.
The same can be done about virtually any OS (including Windows) to make it suck less. But none of them are advertised as the most easy-to-use OS.
Sometimes I want to carry my laptop around, and I want my windows in a particular way. When I plug in my screens again, I want them back again in the multiscreen setup.
This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. So eventually I end up having to move the windows to other screens, maximize, etc before I can get on with my work.
You'd think there was a way where it could remember what was plugged in and restore as appropriate.
I find that whenever I am not on MacOS, I am missing preview and there just isn't any substitute for it.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/digital/...
https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/interact-with-text-in...
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background
I used to do this once in a while, back in PowerPC days. Twenty years ago, it was amusing.
also me: all OSes should just have ffmpeg preinstalled. so we don't relearn these encoding commands over and over again.
Have you seen what happens when Apple preinstalls a useful open source utility? You're lucky if you get one update per decade. Also, if Apple preinstalled ffmpeg, it's going to be limited to only codecs (and maybe containers?) that aren't going to get Apple sued, probably not even the ones they've licensed for system use, so I hope you like 90s codecs.
It's strictly better for Apple/etc to make it simpler to install MacPorts or fink or brew or whatever other package manager is cool today and let you install that and the packages you like, preferably without requiring xcode, because xcode is big.
(AFAIK there's no mass-discard option, but I've never really thought about it before because 99% of the time Preview is showing me something that's already on disk)
Yes, screenshot part of the screen, do a quick edit or highlight in Preview, and paste it to GitHub or email. I never want the screenshots to be saved to disk but end up with my Preview full of "dirty" screenshots.
There used to be command key shortcuts for the don't save/cancel/save (command-d/s/c iirc?) dialog buttons, but they've changed the ui to delete/save and seem to have removed the keyboard equivalents.
The right way to do it (in my opinion) would be option-click on the Delete button or command-option-D, but they don't seem to have implemented that.
Command-d is still mapped to don't save (at least in Preview, just verified). Escape is cancel.
Are you running macOS Monterey? It doesn't seem to have a Don't Save option in the "Do you want to keep this new document" dialog box - it's Delete, and command-d does not work for me.
https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-to-speed-up-mac-with-app...
Are you switching between English and some other Latin alphabet language? Or non-Latin?