A Month of Mac

It’s now been a month since my shiny new Mac arrived. Overall, I’m still really, really happy with it. I’ve bought NetNewsWire for feed reading and textmate for editing. I’m a little concerned that I don’t have the source code for my editor, but we’ll see how that goes.

I’m normally a devout Emacs or Vim user, but Aquamacs turned out to be just too different, despite what Tim Bray says about it. Carbon Vim was a bit better, but still felt a little clunky. TextMate just felt right, and after the recommendations from the rails people, it seemed like a good idea.

The main irritation that I’ve been having is with the keyboard. Apple keyboards don’t come easily to UK Unix users. The tilde is in the wrong position to start with (it’s been swapped with backslash), and I find myself continually hitting the wrong one. Worse is the fact that there’s no hash key on the keyboard in the UK layout. Oh all right, you can hit ⌥-3, but that pastes into the shell as UTF-8 meaning that you can’t comment things out properly in Vim. Why? I have no idea. But it’s meant that I’ve stuck to the US keyboard layout for now, which sucks.

By far and away the worst problem, though is the simple fact that you can’t copy CDs easily. The damned machine comes with a CD burner. It should be a piece of cake to say “take the bits off of this one, then right them on to this blank disk instead”. But no. The only option is to import into iTunes (converting into MP3) and then write the low-fi tracks out from iTunes again. With a 2-second gap between tracks. That really, badly sucks. Particularly when I found out that a previous version of OSX used to come with a “disk copy” utility. Thanks a bunch, Apple.