How I Use My Mac
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Tim Bray wrote a nice piece on his blog titled
"How I Use My Mac". In it, he said "I switched in 2002 and have
written probably way too much on my relationship with Apple computers,
including one piece grandiosely entitled How To Use Mac OS X. Well, I
use one for several hours a day almost every day and while I feel a
little humbler now, I still thought it would be worthwhile writing
down the practices that serve this particular experienced and intense
user well. It crosses my mind that there might be a useful minor meme
in this if a few others did too.". So, since I
found his post interesting, I decided to do an
equivalent post (using pretty much the same sectional groupings as he used).
Disclaimers: I'm a full-time programmer and consultant, so my
usage patterns tend to reflect that. I mostly work from home but do
travel when necessary for client work or conferences.
Disk and Backups: I used to worry about this a lot; however,
I don't any more. Basically, I try to keep my laptop's drive pruned
down to about 60% of the 150GB disk size. I regularly backup to "the
cloud" (I've covered in a
previous post how I use
Jungle Disk and
Amazon S3 to backup data). Since everything is kept off-site and
redundantly maintained, I have access to it when I need it but never
have to worry about losing my data or running out of disk space.
Security: Since I travel with my laptop, I don't keep ANY
sensitive information on it. Everything that is sensitive is either
kept on a secured USB stick or on my Amazon S3 backup.
Hardware: Since I don't travel too much (usually only about 1 week/month), I use a 17-inch MacBook Pro as
my only development box and I connect remotely to client machines. If
I'm traveling and will do development work, I take my Mac with
me. For ubiquitous computing needs (e.g. - when I need access to
email/internet but don't need to do any development work), I used to use an
OLPC XO; however, I now find that
my iPhone meets that requirement quite nicely. It syncs seamlessly
with my Mac and I have access to all my contacts, calendar, email, and
the web so that's usually all I need if I don't have to do any
development work. I've documented my
ergonomic work setup in the past, so I won't re-hash that
here (the only big difference is that I no longer use the foot
switches and the trackpad and
I've replaced the Microsoft mouse with a
VerticalMouse).
Dock: It's on the left and I auto-hide it. The only things I
have in the dock are Finder, Quicksilver (in case Quicksilver dies and
I have to restart it), and Trash. Since I use
Quicksilver as a launcher and for many common tasks, I almost never use the dock, so it's convenient to
just tuck the dock away on the left side of the screen. I used to have it on
the right side; however, I download files to the desktop and found
that I was less likely to accidentally un-hide the dock if it was on
the left side away from downloaded files.
The Screen: I have a 17-inch MacBook Pro and find that screen
sufficient (although I probably wouldn't complain too much if somebody
gave me a 30-inch external flat-screen display ;-)). With most of my apps, I work full-screen, so having a
larger screen is not as useful as it is for somebody who works with
multiple windows open on the same screen. Like Tim Bray, I don't use
(and have disabled)
Dashboard. Unlike Tim, I do use
Spaces. Since I am slightly
OC about keeping an empty desktop (my desktop is almost always as
you see it above: background image only with no objects on it) and a single application
on-screen at any one time, I find that Spaces lets me keep all the
apps that I regularly use in their own space without having to
minimize other apps. I switch between spaces using Cmd-number and find
that I almost never have to "hide" (using Cmd-h) any application. My
Spaces preferences is setup as follows:
- Space #1: GMail (as Tim does, I wrap it with Fluid so that it's always avaialable and not affected by browser crashes). I use GMail "almost" at full-screen (I leave a small vertical section on the right-hand of the screen where I can see downloaded files. I usually move those files to a folder directly after downloading using Quicksilver).
- Space #2: Safari or Firefox (which one I use depends on current features and speed). As with GMail, I use the browser "almost" at full-screen.
- Space #3: Aquamacs Emacs is always running, full-screen, no menu bar, no tool bar.
- Space #4: iCal (full-screen in month-view).
- Space #5: NetNewsWire (full-screen in "traditional" view).
- Space #6: VMWare Fusion is primarily for running Windows or Linux for client-related work. Always full-screen.
- Space #7: Terminal
(full-screen) with 1 or 2 tabs open. I
used to use screen all the time; however, I find that I can currently usually get by with
just 2 tabs in Terminal:
- bash
- An instance of Emacs running IRC (#lisp and/or #clojure)
- Space #8: Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint and Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote. I only run these when needed and usually run them full-screen. Space #8 also serves as a "scratch" space.
- I try to avoid distractions, so I don't use twitter, don't listen to music when I'm coding, rarely use chat, don't use Growl and, although I do frequently keep an IRC session running in Space #3, I tend to just scan IRC periodically (when I have some free time) rather than monitor messages in real-time.
- I rarely use IDE's, preferring to use Emacs for coding (and many other) tasks (I do use MSVC++ under VMWare, but this is primarily due to a requirement of the particular software that I'm working on for a client).
- I used to use Fink and Ports at different times; however, since moving to Leopard, I have abandoned both and now just do native compiles when I need to (even though that sometimes means having to work through the dependencies manually).
- For development work, I prefer a black background (for both Terminal and Emacs) as I find that more restful on the eyes during long coding sessions.
- Unlike Tim, I don't launch all my apps at once in the same order, I launch them when I need them and then leave them running in their own "space". Since I've setup Spaces preferences for each of the main apps that I normally use, they automatically open in the correct space regardless of when (or in which sequence) I open them and I can always access them with the same key chord.
