, 2 min read
Got XFig to work under MacOS with fink
Finally! I got XFig working perfectly under MacOS. Just do “fink install xfig323.” This installs an older version of XFig which does not freeze on you within seconds.
I find it scary how XFig dependent I am. XFig is ancient. Yet, nobody seems to be able to build quite the same type of drawing software.
No. I do not want Adobe Illustrator. I am not an artist. I do not draw pretty pictures. I draw diagrams. They have to be simple (because I cannot draw). The end result should look nice, but I do not want to be tempted into spending hours on diagram crafting. I do not want to draw boxes with little people in it and houses with doors and windows. But I want to draw arrows, text boxes. I want a grid. I want to copy, paste. I want to be able to enter equations (TeX formatted, please). I want some color support, but not too much. I will not need 256 shades of grey. I want to be able to write a script that converts 16 figures to postscript or pdf or svg, or whatever format I prefer (XFig does not support this, but its companion, transfig, does).
Oh! And the tool should be free software (though I am quite willing to pay for it).
Now, the only annoyances left with MacOS are:
- The X11 server will crash routinely for no good reason. It helps to use the quartz windows manager, but there are still problems.
- The X11 server is poorly integrated with MacOS. Copy and paste is broken, totally.
- Somehow, all Apple updates require me to reboot my machine. Even minor updates. This is very annoying when you have a workstation that you are not using to play games or draw diagrams.
- The OS on my Intel MacPro is unstable. Sometimes Finder will freeze and I have to hard boot the machine. This never happens with Linux, and it very rarely happens with Windows (XP or better). On the other hand, the MacBooks are more stable, but the OS will still sometimes go kapout.
- I cannot get used to the freaking apple key. What is wrong with ctrl-x to cut text???
- Why are MacBook keyboards missing a home key to go automatically at the beginning of the line?