macOS notes

Finder preferences

• General
  • New Finder windows show: your home folder
• Sidebar
  • Recents: unchecked
  • Your home folder: unchecked
  • iCloud Drive: unchecked
  • Recent Tags: unchecked
• Advanced
  • Show all filename extensions: checked
  • Keep folders on top: In windows when sorting by name: checked
  • When performing a search: Search the Current Folder

System preferences

Fixing unwanted Spotlight Developer results

1. • If you want to install Xcode, then install it now.

   • If you don't want to install Xcode, then open Terminal and run:

     touch /Applications/Xcode.app

2. Open System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Search Results and uncheck Developer

Hardware issues

• Apple Silicon will result in absolute vendor lock-in
• No replaceable parts
  • Repairs are expensive and take a long time
• Macbooks overheat and get very hot, very easily. 90C CPU temps are ordinary during simple youtube browsing.
• Third-party SSD support is intentionally crippled
• Performance on spinning platter hard drives seems to be degraded in recent macOS versions. "Optimized for SSD" really means "artificially slowed on HDD"
• There's no context keyboard key
• No pgdn/pgup/home/end/ins/del keys and inconsistent replacement shortcuts
• Third-party external monitors don't have full support http://embdev.net/topic/284710#3027030
• The power cables are made out of fuzzy, grainy rubber that falls apart
• 16GB RAM limit until recently
• All Apple mice are bad (though the Apple trackpad is great)
  • The magic mouse:
    • Is imprecise to use and right-clicking is cumbersome because you have to lift your index finger off the mouse
    • Swiping is neat, but more gimmicky than useful. Scrolling is imprecise.
    • Can't be used while charging! The charge port is on the bottom!
    • Not ergonomic: are you holding the mouse upside-down or not?
  • The mighty mouse:
    • Same right click issue as magic mouse; you need to lift your index finger off the mouse to right click
    • Haptic feedback when scrolling is neat, but scrolling is imprecise
  • The hockey puck mouse:
    • Are you holding the mouse upside-down, sideways, or straight?
    • No scroll wheel
  • All other Apple mice: only 1 button, no scroll wheel

Interface issues

• Command-tab is bad. https://isotoma.com/blog/2010/05/10/solving-the-real-alt-tab-problem/
  • Command-tab breaks spatial memory: windows are not arranged by most recently used
  • When you have 2 windows open in one application and 1 window open in a different, it is very tedious to switch between the 3 quickly.
    • http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/solving-the-alt-tab-problem/
  • Switching windows with command-tab brings all windows of that application above other applications, so if you only want to bring focus to one window of an application while preserving the layering of other application windows, you need the mouse
  • When command-tabbing with multiple monitors, the space switches instead of focus switching to the application already displayed on the other monitor
• When you close a program, focus automatically switches to another program which screws up command-tab even more
• The UI is not discoverable. You discover useful features by accident, or by deliberately, painstakingly searching out features that you don't know about.
• Scrollbars are hidden by default, reducing density of useful information that had practically no cost.
• Context menu accelerators (aka context menu hotkeys) are hidden, and not discoverable. The only reason I know some is because they are shown on Windows and Linux
• GUI configuration of GUI behavior is overly simplistic; there are many useful GUI settings hidden behind undocumented defaults settings
• You can't focus the system tray with a hotkey, only the application's menu
  • The application menu hotkey, ctrl+f2 doesn't even always work! https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12723/control-f2-move-focus-to-menu-bar-only-works-occasionally
  • Unless you use VoiceOver, but it is absurd to turn VoiceOver on each time you want to select the system tray
• If you get a 104-key USB keyboard, the end key goes to the end of the document instead of the end of the line, and the numpad enter key has different behavior than the regular enter key
• Forward/back and other extra mouse buttons don't function properly (but they do in Windows and Linux)
  • Forward/back button workaround
• Tray icons can't hide and can take up too much space (even hiding application menus)
• Finder is bad
  • Recents should not be the default window location
  • "Search This Mac" should not be the default search target
  • When accidentally command-tabbing to Finder and there is no window, a new Finder window just pops up
  • Finder can't really be quit, which is the result of settling on an implementation detail that causes bad UX
• The enter key renames folders and files instead of entering the folders or opening the files
• There is no preview of zip files
• Clicking on the time in the taskbar does not show a calendar; you have to open up the calendar app separately
• X11 application integration is intentionally degraded
• There is no hotkey to lock the screen without sleeping. You need to use a hot corner or download third-party software.
  • The touchbar on newer macs can be configured to show a lock button, but the touchbar is an abomination (see below)
• There are no window borders. Shadows overlap and make distinguishing between different windows of tiled applications hard.
  • Windows used to only be resizable from the bottom right corner. Hurray, they fixed that!
  • Workaround to disable shadows: MacForge + noShadows
• With multiple monitors you can't choose which one the dock stays on
• If you accidentally bump the mouse over a command-tab icon then your command-tabbing resets to that icon
• Mouse acceleration ramps up too fast
  • The only free mouse acceleration workaround does not run anymore, because it is unsigned, but the binary can be manually executed from the terminal.
• macOS continually gets stripped down, closer to iOS, at the cost of valuable desktop usability and productivity features
• No trackpad mouse momentum except for when using the very hidden three-finger drag feature
• The Exposé / Spaces grid was dumbed down to linear Spaces in Mission Control. Exposé was a much more productive approach, appropriate for non-phone devices.
• Bad discoverability for how to take screenshots

Software issues

• SMB/CIFS is crazy slow and unreliable even when directly wired into a lan. It seems to be intentionally crippled.
• The command-line tools are old
• "About This Mac" phones home each time it is opened
• 10.10+ is invasive to privacy
• Siri is creepy
• No good builtin SFTP / FTP client, and no good open source GUI SFTP / FTP clients
• You are almost forced to upgrade to the latest version of macos, which lets apple stop caring about quality
  • App developers drop support for non-latest macOS versions quickly, usually without good reason
  • There is no way to stop nags to update to the latest version of macOS, even if that latest version is unsupported on the hardware
• Kernel panic logs get pruned quickly. The only reason to do this is to remove evidence of the numerous kernel panics.
• There's no good tiling window manager
• Apple deprecates software too quickly. Each next release of OS X gets less usable.
• Copying and downloading large files uses more CPU than Windows or Linux, for some reason.
• You can't output different audio at the same time to the laptop speakers and to the aux out port (you can in Windows and Linux)
• The PATH environment variable gets reordered! /etc/profile calls eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`, but it's more of a meddler than a helper
• tar is not compatible with gnu tar or freebsd tar
• No built-in equivalent to MS Paint
• External displays can't be disabled while connected

Filesystem issues

• ".DS_Store turds" everywhere
• "._foo turds" everywhere - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14980/why-are-dot-underscore-files-created-and-how-can-i-avoid-them
• "__MACOSX turds" everywhere - https://superuser.com/questions/104500/what-is-macosx-folder
• Finder litters the above turds everywhere it goes on network shares
• The above turds even make it into tarballs and zip files
• APFS performs poorly on HDD
• HFS+ is prone to data loss
• Dropped NTFS support, and NTFS isn't actually that bad
• Case-sensitive filesystems are practically unusable, because random programs will fail to work

Even more gripes on touchbar macbooks

• No MagSafe power adapter anymore, and the new USB C power cables are a trip hazard.
• The keyboard easily gets stuck, repeated, and missing keys
• The key travel distance is too short to be comfortable, let alone satisfying. You might as well hammer your fingers on wood.
• I quickly discovered that I rest my fingers on the function keys of laptop keyboards sometimes. This is a problem because the touchbar registers any touch as a key press.
• The touchbar has no tactile feedback
  • This is especially bad for people with extra accessibility needs.
• The laptop body is too thin. Mine is actually bent due to an accident outside of my control.
• Need to carry a dongle around everywhere for USB Type-A devices

Other issues

Less applicable to modern macs now that everything is high DPI:

• Font rendering is blurry. People call it "smooth", but no, it's blurry. This is by design, because Apple doesn't want to do font hinting or kerning. It's only acceptable on retina displays because the pixels are small enough for the blurriness to be harder to notice.