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Original Version: 8/27/2009
Last Updated: 8/27/2009
Moving to Mac from Windows or Linux is easy!
I made the move a couple months ago, and I love it. Everything just
works. All the time! This is how computers are supposed to work. As
a user, everything works the way I'd expect. And as a programmer, all
of my programs work the same, and all of the tools I need are available
for free, and work the same as on Windows and Linux.
Three weeks ago, I also moved my 70-year-old mother from Windows to
Mac. No problem. I had set her up years ago to use Firefox and
Thunderbird on Windows, so she now uses them on Mac. I moved her from
MS Office to OpenOffice.org easily. Her Excel spreadsheets and Word
docs all work fine. I downloaded the free Flip4Mac so she can view
Windows Media Player files in QuickTime. I was even able to go to the
Apple download site and find free versions of the games she likes:
Spider Solitaire, Bridge, etc.
So how expensive was it? She bought a Mac Mini with no monitor, no
mouse or keyboard, etc. Also bought a small display adapter cord so we
could plug in the 20-inch LCD monitor she'd been using on her Windows
PC. Works fine. Also plugged in her existing Windows USB wireless
keyboard and mouse. Works fine. Installed her existing USB
printer/scanner/copier. Printer works fine, but scanner doesn't. No
problem -- when she bought the Mac, she got a free-after-rebate
printer/scanner/copier anyhow, so we used that one instead. Total
cost: $620. (OK, actually we bought her the upgraded Mac Mini for $800
instead of $600, and the 3-year extended warranty for an additional
$150, but still the total was only $970.)
She's had no trouble so far. The basic Mac interface for managing
files (Finder) is close enough to Windows Explorer (and Linux KDE,
Gnome, etc.) that there's no learning curve. The built-in search
(Spotlight) is fast, intuitive, and well-integrated -- MUCH better than
Windows Search, more like Google Desktop. No need for Adobe Acrobat
reader -- "Preview" does it. "Activity Monitor" is like Windows "Task
Manager". Obvious things happen when you plug in USB drives and such.
"Time Machine" does automatic backups.
Many of the shortcut keys are even the same as Windows, except it's the
Mac "Command" key sometimes, instead of the Ctrl key or the Windows
"Alt" key (which are both also on the Mac keyboard). Plus there are
lots of extra shortcuts. For example:
| Cmd-Tab | Next window |
| Cmd-A | Select All |
| Shift-Arrow | Extend selection |
| Cmd-C | Copy |
| Cmd-V | Paste |
| Cmd-X | Cut |
| Cmd-F | Find |
| Cmd-G | Find Next |
| Cmd-Shift-G | Find Previous |
| Cmd-E | Find selected text |
| Cmd-Z | Undo |
| Cmd-Shift-Z | Redo |
| Cmd-S | Save |
| Cmd-P | |
| Cmd-N | New |
Connecting to Windows file shares on a LAN is automatic. I copied all of
her Thunderbird mail folders, address books and message filters
directly from Windows to Mac and Thunderbird picked them up
automatically.
If you're a Java programmer with Linux experience, you'll appreciate
the fact that when you open a Terminal window, the Mac OS X command
line is really BSD Unix, so all of your aliases, scripts, etc.
still work. Furthermore, Java works fine and comes pre-installed
(versions 1.3.1, 1.4.2, 1.5.0, and 1.6.0). You can download and run
Eclipse, Tomcat, MySQL, etc., w/no problem. Download the free Aquamacs
Emacs, which is compatible with, but better than, regular GNU Emacs on
Linux or Windows. All of my Java and MySQL code works identically on
Mac as on Windows and Linux, both regular apps and Tomcat-hosted Web
apps. No need to even re-compile, since it's Java. My 22 years worth
of Unix shell scripts all work fine.
My biggest point of pain has been re-writing 17 years worth of Windows
batch files into Unix shell scripts. Easy, since the Unix scripting
languages are so much more powerful and expressive than Windows batch files, so they've all
gotten shorter, with more features and better error handling, but it
takes time to do them all.
Other software:
--Fred
Original Version: 9/11/2008
Last Updated: 1/19/2014
With Mac OS X, you get the following software pre-installed:
Here is some additional software that I recommend. I'm using almost
all of this, and almost all of it is FOSS (free open source software). Exceptions are noted.
Recommendations from other people:
Did I miss any of your favorites? Let me know.
--Fred
Original Version: 6/20/2010
Last Updated: 9/30/2018
Here is a list of some of the more useful shortcut keys for the Mac:
--Fred
Original Version: 1/9/2012
Last Updated: 1/17/2012
Tired of going to Spotlight all the time to launch things? Put
your favorites in the Dock for easy access.
Once you've launched
an app, it appears in the Dock, but only as long as it's still running. To
keep it there permanently, right click its Dock icon and
choose Options |
Keep
in Dock.
[1/17/2012 Update]
Thanks to Amul Shah for reminding me to mention that Cmd-Space is a keyboard
shortcut for Spotlight.
--Fred
Original Version: 1/9/2012
Last Updated: 1/9/2012
Want a certain app to run automatically each time you login to your Mac?
Right click its Dock icon and choose Options |
Open at Login.
--Fred
Original Version: 1/12/2012
Last Updated: 1/12/2012
Do you accidentally drag things out of the dock and lose them?
It's very easy to drag instead of click, when you're moving fast and
don't release the mouse button quick enough. This drags the item
out of the dock, and it vanishes in a puff of smoke. Bummer!
Almost never what I wanted to do, and sometimes I don't even
notice till much later, when I wonder where the dock item went.
Even worse, family members and other Mac users do this on their Macs
and have to ask me to fix it for them, by finding the application in
the Applications folder or the Applications/Utilities folder,
or wherever, and putting it back in the dock as described in Keep
in Dock. My father-in-law used to do that all the time, and
would just suffer without the app until the next time I visited.
A simple answer is to lock the dock so that nothing can be dragged from
it.
Go to a Terminal Window, as described in Terminal
Intro and execute the commands:
% defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true
% killall Dock
This changes the default setting for Dock, and restarts Dock
so that it starts using the new setting.
For more info, see:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1018274
This worked perfectly for my father-in-law, but for myself, I found
a better way. See Lock
the Current Items into the Dock.
--Fred
Original Version: 1/12/2012
Last Updated: 1/17/2012
The technique described at Lock the Dock is
overkill in some cases.
It prevents you from being able to making any change to the Dock items.
This has good effects, like preventing
you from:
However, it also has effects that you may not want, like preventing you from:
Also, it has effects that I definitely did not want, like preventing you from:
Personally, I like to be able to rearrange the items in the Dock,
especially the transient items that represent currently
"minimized" windows. I sometimes treat the Dock as
a stack of tasks that I have to complete, and the order is important
to me. So, I wanted a less extreme way to lock items into the
Dock.
I used the command:
% defaults read | less
to see the rest of the default settings, but didn't see anything
promising. This is not a complete set of possibilities anyhow,
because it only shows the options that have a default value set,
not any other options that are not currently set. Not really
the full list I was looking for.
Then I checked the Web pages:
http://secrets.blacktree.com/?showapp=com.apple.dock
http://secrets.blacktree.com/?show=all
which show long lists of options, but still nothing that looked
promising.
Then I found:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330074-263.html
which describes the (risky) process of directly editing the binary Mac
"property list" file for the Dock:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
I tried this, but couldn't get it to work, whether editing via emacs or (as
it recommends) via TextEdit, and whether or not I deleted the cached file
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.db.
Finally, I downloaded and installed PListEdit Pro 1.5,
from:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/plisteditpro.html
and used it to edit the same file:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
Worked perfectly! So, I paid the $29.95 nagware license.
Here's what I did:
Now I get the desired effects:
and the undesired, but acceptable, effects:
Not ideal, but close enough for now. Any suggestions to make
it better? Especially, any easy way to move future persistent-apps
entries to the static-apps list?
[1/17/2012 Update]
Thanks to Jason DiPrinzio for reminding me that the free Mac development
tools include a property list editor, so you don't really need PListEdit
Pro. At the time that I solved this problem, a couple years ago,
I hadn't yet installed the dev tools. They
are a paid download from Apple, or a free install from your Mac OS
X install disks.
--Fred
Original Version: 1/8/2012
Last Updated: 1/12/2012
Want Finder to show you all files instead of skipping those that start
with a dot (".")?
Go to a Terminal Window, as described in Terminal
Intro and execute the commands:
% defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
% killall Finder
This changes the default setting for Finder, and restarts Finder
so that it starts using the new setting.
[1/12/2012 Update]
Thanks to Vadim Storozhuk for sending me a shell script that toggles
this setting on and off. This is particularly handy because showing
the dot files causes .DS_Store to appear on the Mac desktop, so you
may not always want the setting to be true. See:
Original Version: 1/9/2012
Last Updated: 1/9/2012
Activity Monitor is a built-in Mac utility to show
you what is currently happening on your Mac. It is very similar
to the Unix/Linux top command and the Windows Task
Manager.
It shows some overall system-wide values like: CPU usage,
Memory (RAM) usage, Disk Activity, Disk usage, and Network traffic.
It also shows a list of all currently running processes, with
columns for process id, process name, username, percent of CPU, total
CPU usage since it started, number of threads, physical and virtual
memory being used, etc. You can use the View menu
to change which columns are shown, how often the data is updated, etc.
You can also use Activity Monitor to inspect, sample, and kill processes.
Activity Monitor is
not in the standard Applications folder. It is
in the Utilities subfolder of Applications. However,
you don't have to know that to launch it. Click on the Spotlight icon
(the magnifying glass at the top right of the screen), type "Activity
Monitor" and
hit Enter.
You may want to keep Activity Monitor in your Dock, as described in
Keep in Dock.
--Fred
Original Version: 1/9/2012
Last Updated: 1/9/2012
Want a way to see the current CPU usage of your Mac at a glance? Or
a graph of the recent CPU usage? Or the current memory usage,
or disk activity, or network traffic?
Launch Activity Monitor as described in Intro
to Activity Monitor and
keep it on the dock as described in Keep in
Dock. Then right click its Dock icon and
choose Dock Icon to see the list of things you can
have it show in the Dock icon. If you find this useful enough,
you may also want to set it to automatically start at login as described
in Open at Login.
If you don't want it in the Dock, you can also use the right-click menu
of the Dock icon to
create a small free-floating window that shows CPU usage or history.
--Fred
Original Version: 1/8/2012
Last Updated: 8/2/2018
Tired of pointing and clicking all the time?
If you're a Mac
power user, you'll often prefer the command line interface offered
by the Terminal window.
To open a Terminal window, click on the Spotlight icon (the magnifying
glass at the top right of the screen), type "Terminal" and hit Enter. A
new window will open, running the Unix bash shell, where you can type
commands. To get an idea of what is possible here, see:
--Fred
Original Version: 1/29/2021
Last Updated: 1/29/2021
Since Mac OS X and the newer macOS are both based on BSD Unix, pretty much everything described here for Unix/Linux also applies to Mac:
On Mac OS X, the default shell is bash. On macOS, the default shell is zsh. But in both cases all other shells work fine also, and you can change the default to any shell you like. The same is true for pretty much all commands, redirection techniques, shell scripts, etc. So, be sure to read the tips at that page also.
In fact, as described in Getting Started, one of the best things about moving to Mac from Windows was that all of my decades-old shell scripts and aliases started working again.
--Fred
Original Version: 1/29/2021
Last Updated: 1/29/2021
Want a way to launch the default app for a file, the same as double-clicking the file with the mouse, but done from the command line or a shell script instead?
Use the open command. For example, the command:
open Document1.doc
launches LibreOffice, Apple Pages or Microsoft Word, whichever one is the program associated with ".doc" files on your computer.
For more info on the open command, type:
man open
You can do the same thing in Windows and Unix/Linux. See:
--Fred
Original Version: 1/29/2021
Last Updated: 1/29/2021
Want a way to launch the default app for a URL, the same as clicking the URL with the mouse, but done from the command line or a shell script instead?
Use the open command. For example, the command:
open mailto:tips@bristle.com
launches your mail program (Thunderbird, Eudora, Apple Mail, etc.) and fills in my e-mail address in a blank message. All you have to do is type in the rest of the message and hit Send. Similarly, you can open your default Web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) at a specific Web page via:
open http://bristle.com
For more info on the open command, type:
man open
You can do the same thing in Windows and Unix/Linux. See:
--Fred
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