Mac frustrations, a month later
I’ve been using OSX (Leopard) for about a month now, and I’m still (mostly) enjoying it. It’s pretty, it’s smooth, iPhoto is growing on me, and it was a good decision. Particularly since my old computer simply didn’t work anymore… Anyway, now that it’s been a while, most of the annoyances I had at first have passed. But not all of them! So I thought I’d share the few things that still consistently bother me.
First, keyboard shortcuts, specifically getting to the beginning and end of text fields. In Windows and Linux, ‘Home’ and ‘End’ take you to the beginning and end of a line. In OSX, hitting apple-right and apple-left do the same thing. Sometimes. GMail (and Google Docs) ignore this Mac standard for some bullshit reason, and instead use older console shortcuts, Ctrl-E for the end of a line and Ctrl-A for the beginning. Except, that won’t let you select text. hitting apple-shift-left will, usually, select all of the text between your cursor and the beginning of a line, helpful for deleting or cutting-and-pasting. Hitting ctrl-shift-a doesn’t do a damn thing. What the hell? I don’t know if this is a Mac problem, a Google problem, or both, and I don’t really care. It’s fucking stupid.
Less frustrating, it’s not possible to drag bookmarks around in the Firefox bookmarks menu like it is on every other OS. Likewise, middle-clicking on them won’t open them up in a new tab. This is a known bug, and Firefox claims some rewrite of some core code in the pipeline will solve this, but I’m unconvinced and annoyed.
Super obnoxious, and what prompted me to write this post, is the Finder. Yes, it’s pretty, and yes, it mostly works. But it sort of sucks. There’s no way to tell it “Always open Finder windows at this size. Yes, always. I know you don’t want to, but I want you to. Dammit, stop opening so fucking small!” It’s impossible to sort alphabetically while separating folders. Mac apparently wants your folders to mingle with your files in some file-system utopia, but that’s stupid. I don’t have my file folders are work organized with folder-file-file-folder-file-folder-folder-folder, because I wouldn’t be able to find anything. I have the files first (or last) and the folders last (or first) so I can easily find things. This continues to bug the hell out of me, and makes it take twice as long to find anything. (No, Sort By Type isn’t a solution. I only want the folders separate. And no, using the quicksearch isn’t a solution, because I may remember where I put a folder but not what I named it. Funny how we’re evolved to use spatial memory, huh?)
Last on design concerns, I still want to be able to alt-click and drag a window. Linux does this, and it makes window management so much easier, since you don’t have to hit the tiny little title bar to move windows around.
I’m also still bugged by the general ethos of every little utility requiring payment. I’m coming from Windows and, more recently, Linux, where you can always find a little utility or software to do what you want, legally, for free. I’ve found utilities to let me sort folders the way I want and to alt-click windows to move them, but they’re $15 and $40(!!) which just seems stupid. I’m all in favor of people getting paid for their work, but I’m much more comfortable in the Linux and Windows environment where these stupid little utilities are free, because they’re stupid little utilities.
Edit: I found an add-on that solves the Firefox problem of jumping to the beginning or ending of a line of text. That specific add-on actually changes more keyboard shortcuts than I wanted, so I followed this link to a modified version that only changes the home/end use. That’s one peeve down, anyway…
toys
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frustration, mac, osx, toys
Themocracy
This may solve your window woes: http://windowdragon.sourceforge.net/
As for a Finder work around, one possibility is to “label” (cmd-I, select a color) all your folders and sort by label. That preserved alphabaticity for me and separated all the folders out. PITA to set up, but achieves your desire.
Oh, and ctrl-shift-a/e and cmd(-shift)-right/left work fine for me in Safari in gmail/gdocs, but work as you describe in Firefox, so I suspect this is another Firefox issue.
Thanks! I bookmarked Window Dragon and will play with it when I have some more energy.
As for Gmail/Firefox, it seems more like my experiences with OSX refusing to play the video files generated by my Sony video camera: either Sony or Mac could make the effort to solve the incompatibility, but neither is willing to budge. Likewise, I’ve definitely seen enough odd situations where the Firefox devs have said, “Tough shit! This is how we’re going to do it, and you should like it!” to believe they have some non-standard hook that conflicts with GMail, but it’s also telling that it specifically fails in GMail and almost nowhere else – that would indicate Google could change something to make the commands work as intended…
Have you tried Safari?
–signed the only person on earth that uses Safari for Windows who refuses to use Mac OSX
(PS I’m sure this isn’t an issue because you probably have a big enough hard drive, but FYI if you delete file(s)/folder(s) and them empty the bin OSX doesn’t give you back the hard drive space until you reboot)
Thanks for stopping by, and for the comment, mystic_eye_cda. I haven’t really tried Safari too much, mainly because I love Firefox’s plugin architecture. I may try Chrome if/when it finally comes out for OSX and releases a version with plugins, but I just can’t conceive of browsing without AdBlock, FlashBlock, bookmark syncing, and so on.