JaikusIt’s official. I’ve bought a Mac. I have never used a Mac before, and I am actually enjoying the discovery process I have to go through to get up to speed on this new platform. (Example: While writing this first paragraph, I figured out - by trial and error - that you select words in chunks with Shift+Option, not Shift+Ctrl like on Windows.)
I’ve already had several small victories in the process of customizing OS X to my needs, and since Google Analytics reports that one third of you readers are on a Mac, I’d like to share a quick tip with you. One of my main reasons to switch to Mac is the availability of the terminal; which unleashes the power of the Darwin system behind the fancy GUI. I had half expected the visual aspects of this terminal to be highly configurable, and while some options exists, it wasn’t immediately possible to get the terminal to slide down in a cool Quake-style console way like I had dreamed of for a while.
So I set out to find a way to do this, and through this forum thread I found out that I was not the only Mac user with this strange need. Some of the clever geeks taking part in the thread has been so nice as to actually write a small application that enables the terminal to slide down; called Visor. I’m quite impressed with OS X being flexible enough to provide this kind of extensibility.
The installation is quite easy - just follow the instructions and make sure you have OS 10.4 - but one thing caught me, being a complete Mac newbie, as a small frustration: I didn’t know to look for the Visor icon (which is a small black terminal) next to the clock in the upper right corner. You must configure Visor using this menu (which will appear when you (re)start Terminal after following the instructions) before the terminal is able to slide down using your selected hot key.
As a final touch I’ve also opted to make the terminal semi-transparent and added some eye candy as a background image. You do this by opening a normal shell window in Terminal, make your settings in Window Settings > Colors and restarting Terminal. Visor also supports animated backgrounds, but I haven’t tried that out.
While I’m quite happy with Visor, I still have my doubts about whether Microsoft Entourage is the right email application for me (as a heavy Outlook user through many years it seemed an obvious choice) and whether Fire is the right instant messenger. One thing that really annoys me, and that I haven’t been able to solve so far, is that OS X automatically puts the computer to sleep when I close the lid. I am aware that various heating issues can occur if it didn’t, but I’m just used to close the lid while the computer is shutting down - this will put it to sleep during the shutdown. If anyone knows of a good solution for this, I’d be happy to hear from you.