, 1 min read
My favorite MacOS applications
I made the switch to MacOS several months ago. I am now an experienced Mac user.
Here are my favorite applications:
- TextWrangler. It is a free text editor that has pretty much everything you could dream off except for some nifty things like autocompletion. There is a commercial version called BBedit, but I do not know how well it supports LaTeX (autocompletion?).
- Firefox. Enough said. Try the GrApple theme for a more integrated look and feel.
- The basic Apple applications are good enough: iTunes, Preview, Terminal, and so on. I found some of the replacements, like iTerm, to be more complicated. For example, iTerm maps the arrow keys in such a way that vi will no longer work. They are even quite open about the fact that they hacked the keyboard mapping. I can’t have that! Leave my keyboard alone! I simply regret that Preview will not automatically reload a PDF file that has changed on disk.
- When in a bash shell, the open command is really very useful. Generally, you can do pretty much everything using a remote ssh shell under MacOS: mount drives, install software, and so on. I know because I do it. All the time.
- Fink is good but do not bother trying to get X11 working unless you really need to. You can get XFig and gnuplot to work though.
- NeoOffice is good. It is a good replacement for the Microsoft Office that I will not buy. However, getting MacOS to open doc files with NeoOffice is not so obvious (hint: you have to right-click on a file, then click on Get Info).- Eclipse works well.