It just landed there, really
by Tom Temple
Nov 7, 05:49 PM
I was minding my business in the lab when a Macbook fell in my lap. It’s not like I’m going to throw it out. So I’m putting all the sweet stuff on there. Except I don’t know what all the sweet stuff is. I know Quicksilver and Texshop, but that’s about it. Could you guys (after the obligatory jokes/sarcasm) tell me what the other indispensable apps are? I’ve got the Leopard, I think… Whatever the new one is called. Well, I’ll have it in “about and hour and 52 minutes”.
In particular, I’m hoping there is something like Cygwin’s install-the-kitchen-sink option that makes the command line into something that could pass for a real unix prompt. Actually, I’m hoping for something like apt. But barring that, a kitchen-sink option would do.
Nov 7, 06:32 PM
Fink: Awesome or not awesome?
Aquamacs?
Can I get a kill ring?
Nov 7, 06:49 PM
I prefer MacPorts to Fink, myself. I use Aquamacs, and yes, it does support the kill ring.
Nov 8, 01:21 AM
Can I get the kill ring to work across programs like the usual, one element clipboard? Also, is there a better window manager than the built-in “spaces”? It’s not bad but I’d like to be able to add a few more shortcuts.
Nov 8, 11:43 AM
This isn’t in the vein of sexy system utilities, but both Papers and BibTex are good options for pdf management. Papers in particular is pretty cool.
SuperDuper is a great app, but I don’t know how necessary it is if Time Machine works the way its supposed to.
Nov 8, 11:44 AM
This isn’t in the vein of sexy system utilities, but both Papers and BibDesk are good options for pdf management. Papers in particular is pretty cool.
SuperDuper is a great app, but I don’t know how necessary it is if Time Machine works the way its supposed to.
Nov 9, 08:58 PM
Unfortunately, most programs still have only one pasteboard. There are command-line tools that let you distinguish a few different ones, but that doesn’t help in the GUI. So — no, the kill ring won’t port across applications, but regular copy-and-paste do work both into and out of Aquamacs, so you’re not totally shafted.
Also, you can instruct Aquamacs to start up the emacs-server process, and set your EDITOR to a script that talks to it, so that other tools will pop up their editing in your running Emacs session. That’s how I do virtually all of my programming.
Nov 12, 12:34 PM
1) Michael, could you say a little more about that environment variable? I tried (export EDITOR=emacsclient) but it didn’t work. (”$EDITOR file” worked but “open file” didn’t)
2) Oh my god is Quicksilver awesome. Also the keyboard shortcut page in System utilities is pretty sweet. Searchlight puts the Windows Search to shame.
3) Big problem though. Ordinarily I’ve got a lot of Firefox browsers open in several different “spaces” (what they are calling their virtual desktops). If I Apple-tab to Firefox, it drops me in one of them (the most recent in the current space, otherwise seemingly at random). If that isn’t the one I want, I can apple-apostrophe to get to other Browsers. This is a pain, but would be managable except that apple-apostrophe only works within the current space! So to switch to a different browser in a different space, I need to change spaces first. This is pretty much unacceptable. Dex was much better than this. Anybody have a solution? I’d be willing to change window managers over this.
4) TexShop’s Apple-T is pretty sweet, but I don’t really care for its text editor (the search sucks, paren matching is impossible to see). Jon, what are you using? Has anyone gotten Aquaemacs to compile/display with texshop? Also note, I’d settle for preview-latex if it worked with graphix.
Nov 12, 01:58 PM
Tom – TexShop’s editor has always been adequate for me, but as alternatives you might check out TextMate ($) or MacVim (Free). I’ve heard they are both pretty good.
Nov 12, 05:33 PM
WhatSize is fantastic disk space management utility. Caffeine is a handy, dirt-simple utility for sleep/power save management.
Nov 12, 09:43 PM
I have my EDITOR variable set to point to a little executable shell script called “edit.sh” that contains the following two lines:
#!/bin/sh
emacsclient -a “emacs” $*
This has the effect of trying to connect via emacsclient; but if emacs is not running, then it starts up whatever version of emacs is visible in the PATH at that point in time. So, okay.
Meanwhile, I also have the following two commands in my .emacs file:
(server-start)
(global-set-key “\C-xc” ‘server-edit)
The first obviously starts up the server process; the second binds a key to exit from a server buffer—-you want something like this because C-xC-c is bound to save-buffers-kill-emacs, and that’s not what you want if you are planning to keep the editor running all day like I do. What key you use doesn’t matter, but I like C-xc because it’s comfortably close to what I’m doing by default anyway.
When I log in, I boot up Aquamacs, which reads your .emacs file and the rest takes care of itself.
Nov 12, 09:47 PM
Oh, sorry, I forgot about your other question. I have not tried this, but these instructions seem to address the problem of how to integrate TeXShop with Emacs. Give it a shot.