Notes on Mac OS X

All the customizations that I prefer for a Mac OS X box.

Useful Third-Party Software

Unique to OS X (as far as I know):

• SSHKeychain automates setting up ssh-agent, and also prompts for keys when necessary.

• Quicksilver provides something of a commandline for the GUI. Press command-space, type in the name of any application, file, or folder, and then perform all sorts of actions. This can be useful in conjunction with Apple scripts, too.

Other useful software

• Enhanced Emacs is standard GNU Emacs with a bunch of other useful packages (largely TeX-related) added on. I really prefer to use the option key for meta, and inserting (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil) into ~/.emacs will do that. Also, I abhor courier, and add this to my custom-set-variables variable:

   '(default-frame-alist (quote ((tool-bar-lines . 0)
    (menu-bar-lines . 1) (font .
    "-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-m-100-mac-roman"))))

• R and Bioconductor are great tools for statistics and microarrays.

• Fink is a package manager that allows the easy installation of all sorts of UNIX software, like apt on Debian, or cygwin on Windows. I don't particularly like the way they use an odd /sw directory instead of /usr/local for everything, but it's still great for getting lots of UNIX ports.

OS X Functionality

• Option as meta under X11 -- Run the command defaults write com.apple.x11 swap_alt_meta -boolean true to get the option key to act as the meta key. The man page for Xquartz has lots of other useful stuff too.

• Text Boxes -- If an application is written with the Cocoa API (most), then text boxes obey the basic Emacs text editing commands (C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f, C-k, C-y). This can be customized to pretty much anything via ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBindings.dict. Documentation at Apple's site. Also, there's a 3rd party plugin that does a lot more stuff.

• SOE IMAP mail accounts and Mail.app -- In order to get mail folders to work correctly, set the IMAP Path Prefix in the advanced options to ~/mail.

• Application Switching

• Cmd-Tab-- Sort of like alt-tab on Windows. However, instead of switching among all the open windows, it switches between all the open applications. Once you're in the application you want, Cmd-` (that's a backtick, above the tab key) will cycle through an application's windows pretty much everywhere (except PowerPoint, annoyingly!).
• Exposé-- F9, F10, F11 activate a zooming window managment. F11 shows the desktop, F10 shows the current application's windows, and F9 shows all windows.

• OS X-specific UNIX utilities

• open Opens a file or directory using the Finder's method. For example $ open . will open the current directory in the Finder. $ open data.xls will open the file in Excel. The alias alias em='open -a Emacs' open files from the command line in the graphical Emacs linked above.
• pbcopy and pbpaste -- redirects standard output and input to and from the clipboard, respectively.