Prelude To An Epilogue Mac OS

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Prelude

It's time I resume what I started inmy previous article documenting my first year as an OS X usera few months ago.

In this article I'll focus primarily on the applications I've adoptedduring my short time being a Mac OS X user, after being a GNU/Linuxuser for quite some time before that. The focus of the article will bemostly desktop applications, since the command-line tools are more orless the same in both operating system. I will mention a couple of OS Xspecific command-line tools near the end of the article though.

Productivity

Office Suite

On Linux I was mostly using LibreOffice (chiefly its Impressmodule) and while it did get the job done I wasn't particularlyfond of it. At some point I was so frustrated with LibreOffice, that Istarted running Microsoft Office withCodeWeavers CrossOver for Linux. Ifyou like LibreOffice - it's available on OS X as well. If you don'tlike it - you have some solid alternative available.

First, there is a native port of Microsoft Office for OS X. It's a farcry from the Windows version of the app, but it does have a fewadvantages over LibreOffice. If you're doing a lot of documentauthoring and editing it might be a good option for you.

The other office suite you might want to explore is Apple's owniWorks. It has a few distinct advantages over Microsoft Office -you can buy only the apps you need (as opposed to the whole suite), itintegrates great with the OS (but that's hardly a suprise) and it'smuch cheaper. I only bought Pages (Apple's Word alternative)and Keynote (PowerPoint alternative). Pages is a so-soapplication, but Keynote is simply fantastic. I write a lot ofpresentations and for the first I actually enjoy the process.

Instant Messaging

Skype

Skype has a native client for OS X, that's much more stable andfeatureful than the Linux one.

Pidgin/Kopete

Prelude To An Epilogue Mac Os 8

OS X Mountain Lion ships with an app similar to Pidgin and Kopetecalled Messages (and iMessage in older OS X versions). It supportsa plethora of chat protocols, but it kept constantly disconnecting andcrashing for me, so I started looking for analternative. Adium is a great free IM app thatsupports many protocols and works flawlessly (at least for me), so I'drecommend it to everyone.

IRC

If you're in the market for an XChat replacement look no further thanColloquy. Personally I used Emacs's ERC underLinux and continue to use it under OS X as well.

Twitter

Twitter has an official desktop app for OS X, that's available for freein the Mac App store. It has one notable shortcoming - no retinasupport. Rumour has it Twitter will kill the app in the future, but itgets the job done for the time being and there are plenty ofalternatives lying around.

Browser

The default OS X browser Safari is great and has some fairly uniquefeatures like pinch to zoom gesture support (smartphone users willappreciate those). Unfortunately it has a pretty small selection ofplugins and might not be well suited for power users. I recommend theuse of Google Chrome on OS X, since Firefox really seems to lag in termsof features there (the upcoming Firefox 18 will be the first withRetina support).

Email

OS X's default application Mail is decent, but nothingmore. Thunderbird is available for OS X, but I personally think it's nobetter than Mail. My desktop email client of choice is the delightfulSparrow. It's the firstdesktop email client I ever liked (I used to check my email withterminal clients and Emacs afterwards) and has great integration withGMail (it even supports GMail's keyboard shortcuts), Dropbox,Facebook, etc. While it's a doomed product sinceGoogle acquired Sparrow I plan tocontinue using it in the foreseeable future.

Keyboard remapping

By default you cannot remap that many things in OS X. The small utilityKeyRemap4MacBook allowsyou to do much crazier remappings and despite its name the tool workson all recent Macs.

Virtualization Software

The go-to desktop virtualization solution favoured by most Linux usersis VirtualBox and it's available for OS X as well. VirtualBox gets thejob done, but doesn't even come close toParallels in terms of performance,stability and integration with OS X. Parallels support for Windowsguests is particularly good.

Software Development

Text Editing

Every major text editor has a port for OS X, so things are prettymuch the same here. On OS X you'll also get access toTextMate. My affection for Emacs is widelyknown though. Excellent Emacs builds are availablehere and the upcoming Emacs 24.3 willfinally feature OS X Lion style full-screen support. If the mention ofEmacs and vim scares you I'd recommend trying outSublime Text 2.

IDEs

Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ are available (no suprise since theyare all Java apps) and look and perform great on OS X. There's alsoApple's own XCode, which I found unwieldy.

Terminal Emulator

OS X comes with a pretty barebone terminal emulator calledTerminal. I wouldn't advice anyone to spent much time with it.

Install iTerm2. It redefinesthe meaning of insanely great.

Shells

Particle shift mac os. OS X comes with Bash enabled by default, but Zsh is also preinstalledand you can easily enable it by typing:

Media

Video player

As in Linux VLC is the king.

Audio player

iTunes fits the bill for a basic music player. I still haven't found anOS X app which I like as much as Linux's Amarok and Exaile.

UPnP server

Under Linux I used to use MediaTomb and it performed great. It'savailable for OS X as well, but was causing a lot of problems for me,so I finally decided to go with a commercial solution. I heartilyrecommend Playback. Ofcourse if your media player supports NFS you should go with it insteadof UPnP.

File Transfer

FTP

Filezilla isextremely popular under Linux and has a native OS X version aswell. Cyberduck seems to be the top choice ofOS X users.

Bittorrent

There are plenty of great Bittorrent clients on Linux - Deluge,KTorrent, Transmission, etc. Transmission is the only with an OS X portand it seems that it's also the only popular OS X torrent client.

Package Management

OS X has no official package managent tool but it has plenty ofunofficial ones. Currentlyhomebrew seems to be the mostpopular option. Its package selection is quite vast and I've rarelyexperienced problems with it. While regular users are unlikely to useanything from outside the Mac App store, developers and power usersshould definitely check homebrew out. Bubble golem mac os.

Command Line

Most of the command line applications that you know and love fromLinux are available in OS X (by default or installable via homebrew) aswell (but might be slightly different since Linux ships with GNU'sversion of many tools and OS X with BSD's). Here's a few notable OS Xspecific commands:

Prelude To An Epilogue Mac Os Catalina

  • open - opens a file or directory in the appropriate desktop application
  • pbcopy and pbpaste allow you to interact with OS X's clipboard

  • launchctl is a rough equivalent to the service and chkconfig commands on some Linux distros

  • fs_usage allows you to monitor your filesystem usage statistics

  • system_profiler gives you information about your hardware configuration (kind of like lshw)

Epilogue

Prelude To An Epilogue Mac Os X

Mac

This was a whirlwind tour of so many apps. I hope that my superficialtreatment of many of them won't stop you from trying them out. Itseems to me that the app selection catalogue on OS X is not as vast asthe one on Linux, but there's also a tendency that established OS Xapps are much more polished and reliable.





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