Hello Mac

After many years with Ubuntu and four years with my Dell I decided to get myself a new computer, a MacBook Air 13’.

I can’t really say why I decided to change to a Mac more than I wanted to test it for real. I’ve heard of many people changing away from Linux distributions to Mac because they want “something that just works” but the last years that has not really been an issue, Ubuntu has been very stable on my Dell and I even like Unity.

I choosed the 13’ over the retina based 15’ mainly because of the size. I want a computer that’s easy to cary and travel with.

I expected the switch to Mac OS to be a bit more complicated but so far the transition has been pretty straight forward. After all this is mostly how me screen looks like and a browser on the other desktop.

Screenshot of terminals

Getting environments up and running has been quite smooth. The upgrade to Mountain Lion breaked and removed some things which was a bit unexpected though. For extra packages I decided to go with MacPorts, this decision was only based on recommendation and I did not digg in to the difference of the alternatives but I’m happy with it so far. For terminal I switch between the default and iTerm2.

My editor of choice is Vim which is the same. Previously I’ve more or less just used the NERDTree plugin and some decent theme together with vim-common. But for this setup I decided to try Janus to get up and running quickly. Janus also added some new features that I slowly adpating and learning now, seems like a nice package that I can recommend. I mainly use the arrow keys for navigation in Vim but they randomly stopped working after the upgrade to Mountain Lion (maybe related to switching between different desktops) but after some Internet searching I found that adding TERM=linux to my .bashrc solved that issue.

The biggest transition for me has been with the keyboard. I did not really understand until now how much I actually use the home and end keys. This has forced me to learn some new shortcuts in vim which I previously did not needed to know of. The other keyboard issue has been the switch from a Swedish layout to a U.S. layout, the Swedish layout requires some very unnatural gestures for programming activities in Mac OS.

I’m not so happy with the Finder application though, the lack of tab support annoys me and the mapping of enter to rename freaks me out.

But overall I’m happy with the switch, my biggest fear now is that Mac OS will be to much of a lock in and turned into something like iOS.

Photo of my Dell

Bye bye my old Dell, I’ll miss you. XOXO