Mac OS X

I have sometimes no alternatives but using Mac/Intel computers. In this page, I try to list some random tricks to make them somehow more usable.

Keyboard Shortcuts

A table with more shortcuts than I could ever know:
http://homepage.mac.com/frakes/MOSXPT/content/keyboard.html
However, below are some shortcuts which seem to miss in this table.

fn command F1 | fn command F2

Detect displays.

fn option F1 | fn option F2

Open System Preferences/Displays.

fn option F3 | fn option F4

Open System Preferences/Sound.

A table of symbols used to pretty-print hotkeys in Mac OS X:
http://images.apple.com/education/accessibility/technology/pdf/symbols.pdf
I began to write a table with Unicode code point but such tables have already been done elsewhere. Besides some symbols (the upwards white arrow ⇧ for example) seems to be not rendered properly, sometimes, with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Mac OS X Tiger but I always see them perfectly on Safari... or with Firefox on Ubuntu!

An article to set up decent keybindings for Cocoa text fields:
Customize the Cocoa text binding system
Playing with Cocoa keybindings customization capabilities this article describes, I wrote a small Perl script which acts as a filter from Unix Compose files supplied on standard input to Cocoa KeyBindings plist returned on standard output. The key which Compose is mapped to is hard-coded in a variable at the beginning of the script; by default, the Enter key (⌅) is used. It could be more usefull to produce new keymaps to target non-Cocoa applications as well, but that will be for another day!

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Scheduling with launchd

Each job scheduled by launchd is defined in a plist. Parameters of such plist are documented in the launchd.plist(5) man page. To create a new job my_new_job.plist in the current directory:

$ defaults write $PWD/my_new_job Label "My new job"

"My new job" is the key which uniquely identifies the job to launchd.

$ defaults write $PWD/my_new_job ProgramArguments -array sh "-c" '"fetchmail > /dev/null 2>&1"'

Specifies the command-line to run.

$ defaults write $PWD/my_new_job StartCalendarInterval -dict Hour -int 21 Minute -int 45

The job will be launched every day at 9:45pm. Minute, Hour, Day, Weekday (0 and 7 are Sunday), Month may be fixed, or left as wildcards.

$ launchctl load $PWD/my_new_job.plist

Register the job.

$ launchctl unload $PWD/my_new_job.plist

Unregister it.

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Safe-sleep

By default, only regular sleep (suspend-to-ram) was enabled in the version of the MacBook I use. Two command-lines to enable safe-sleep (traditionally referred as suspend-to-disk or hibernation):

Changes are applied after rebooting. The hibernatemode option in power management settings selects the suspend policy:

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

always regular sleep (disable safe-sleep)

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1

always safe-sleep (disable regular sleep)

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

regular sleep first, safe-sleep if the battery is very low on power or is unplugged

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5

always safe-sleep with secure virtual memory

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 7

regular sleep first then safe-sleep with secure virtual memory

The following applescript puts the mac to sleep: tell application "System Events" to sleep. The sleep command turns out to be in the Finder's dictionary too.

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cdrtools

cdrtools is packaged in MacPorts. My Mac automatically mounts CD-roms as soon as I insert them: I unmount them with a diskutil unmount /dev/disk1. According to this site, IOCompactDiscServices or IODVDServices may be used whether the Mac has got a mere CD-Rom drive or a CD/DVD combo-drive. Therefore I put:

in /etc/default/cdrecord file.

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