Learning to Love the Mac, Part 2: Mouse Tips & Desktop Management

I have an 8-button Logitech MX500 optical mouse, and this week is the first time I've ever successfully mapped functionality to all the buttons. Windows did a reasonable job with a few of the buttons; Linux doesn't support anything beyond the first three; Mac OS X Server just gets it done.

Out of the box, my third button (scroll wheel) is mapped to the seemingly pointless Dashboard, which is a huge pain when you're used to middle-clicking to open a link in a new tab or to copy/paste text in a console. To get that functionality back, go to Applications > System Preferences > Exposé & Spaces then remove Mouse Button 3 from the Dashboard's "Hide and Show" feature.

Next, I set Mouse buttons 5, 6, and 8 to All windows, Application windows, and Show Desktop.

But even cooler than these is Spaces, though as yet I can't find a way to replicate Gnome or XFCE's ability to move windows from from Space to Space which lets you drag open app windows from Space to Space which in the Spaces view (F8). Still, having up to 16 virtual desktops is very handy, particularly when you need to virtualize Windows and Linux. If you want to be able to have console windows on all Spaces rather than having them all collected on a single Space, uncheck the "When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application".

Learning to Love the Mac: 13 Tips

A month ago a very large package arrived in the mail: my first MacPro server. I at once fell in love with the case design - clean, simple, and dead-easy to take apart in order to add more drives and RAM. However, that's where the love boat ran aground.

To say it's been a gradual learning curve would be an understatement. Here are a few things I've learned over the past month of dealing with Mac hardware and OS, as well as retraining my fingers to use Mac keyboard bindings (META = Apple Key or Windows Key, depending on your keyboard).

1. Use META-TAB instead of ALT-TAB to cycle applications
2. Use META-LEFT/RIGHT instead of HOME/END to jump to start/end of a line
3. Use ALT-LEFT/RIGHT instead of CTRL-LEFT/RIGHT to jump to prev/next word on a line
4. META-A, META-X, META-C, META-V replace CTRL-A, CTRL-X, CTRL-C, CTRL-V for select all, cut, copy, & paste. META-L, META-T, META-N replace CTRL-L, CTRL-T, CTRL-N (jump to location bar, new tab, new window). But CTRL-TAB still switches tabs. However, if you have multiple Firefox windows open, there is no way to toggle between them with the keyboard. Same problem with multiple Terminal windows. META-TAB only switches between groups of applications, but not windows within an application.
5. Sometimes ESC works to dispose a dialog; sometimes only clicking the red X works.

6. Q replaces qemu, but doesn't seem to work very well for my existing vmware or Virtual Box images
7. Virtual Box rocks on Windows, Linux and Mac

8. XCode provides gcc, make, etc.
9. Fink and DarwinPorts replace Debian/Ubuntu's apt-get and Gentoo's emerge, respectively. Once XCode and DarwinPorts are installed, you can port install vpnc (to fetch deps and compile on the fly) or apt-get install curl (to fetch deps and install).
10. rEFIt replaces grub, and more or less works as I'd expect. /efi/refit/refit.conf approximately replaces /boot/grub/menu.lst at least as far as picking what partition to default-boot and how long to wait

11. Java is in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home instead of /opt/ or /usr/lib/jvm/java
12. Subversion was easier to set up on Mac (using Fink) than on Fedora 10 (using yum), especially since there's now the Galileo+ Update Site from Cloudsmith so you don't have to download from multiple update sites to get it installed.

    However, the version of Subversion available via Fink doesn't work with projects checked out using Eclipse - seems that the commandline client (Subversion 1.4.4) and Subversive with SVNKit (SVN 1.6.1 w/ SVNKit 1.3.0.beta.r5741) are not compatible: svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client. Using DarwinPorts to update the subversive client to 1.6.3 fixed this issue, but installed it into a different path (/opt/local/bin instead of /sw/bin or /usr/bin).

13. Eclipse looks better on Mac than on Linux; however, I recently stumbled across a great tip for making Eclipse waste less screen space under gtk on Linux. Highly recommended bit of gtk hackery - one file makes a world of difference!

Do you have any other tips for Linux or Windows people, surviving the transition to Mac OSX? Is there any way to tell OSX to use Windows or Linux keyboard defaults so I don't have to retrain myself?