Now I am Trendy
My development environment at work lately has consisted of a personally owned 17″ Windows XP clunker laptop and a company-owned desktop with dual 19″ LCDs running opensuse 10.2. All together I had 2 machines and 3 monitors cooperating happily with synergy. In general, I was pretty happy with this setup. The desktop made a great workstation but the laptop, even with a bump to 2gb ram awhile back, was starting to show its age (28 months). At the office this wasn’t such a big deal but when I had to use the laptop at home it was a real pain.
In any case, a well-equipped nearly-new 17″ macbook pro recently freed up at the office and on the urging of my coworkers I took it home to try yesterday evening. I haven’t used a mac for any significant duration since the pre-OSX days so it has been a bit fun exploring an unfamiliar environment. Thought I would share my thoughts after banging on it for the first few hours.
Things I don’t like:
- Why the hell is the ‘fn’ key where CTRL should be?
- I currently prefer the xp/gnome style of maximize/user-pref for windows over the mac ‘zoom’ approach.
- Took me more than 5 minutes to find a subversion client that was useful. First one I grabbed didn’t support SSH making it completely useless.
- I keep trying to use CTRL for various shortcuts instead of ⌘
- …
Things I like:
- bash
- F9-F11
- Spotlight is incredible
- The display is excellent
- Text looks wonderful
- I prefer the dock greatly over the minimized window approach in xp/gnome
So whether its the OS or the newer hardware or a combination of the two this thing is pretty nice. My issues are all related to familiarity and given that Microsoft fumbled a bit with Vista perhaps this was the next logical step in terms of laptop anyway. It just happened sooner than I anticipated. The laptop is running tiger as it was purchased barely before leopard was released. Perhaps if it sticks with me i’ll have to pull the trigger on the upgrade.
Tejus said,
December 9, 2007 at 9:33 am
Welcome to the Dark Side.
Fn being where ctrl should be is also a peeve of mine. Which is why I reverted back to the old-school layout of having ctrl be the caps lock key.
The one thing I really like about ⌘ being the major modifier is that copy/paste/cut involving the terminal is the same hotkey as other applications.
gtuhl said,
December 9, 2007 at 1:45 pm
I’ve got to say the more I use it the more I like it. I’ve got my full dev stack setup now, e-mail just how I want it, and my music files moved over.
Even with just a couple days of usage the whole non-maximized windows thing no longer bothers me and combined with F9/F10 it just makes a lot more sense. The fn/ctrl thing still doesn’t feel familiar (especially since emacs requires ctrl for almost everything) but I imagine that will get better with more time.
Everything just feels easier and less bloated. I should have switched sooner.