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by pooriaazimi 5244 days ago
If I had to choose between a pretty and easy to use OS (that lets me write programs in peace and not have to manually fix everything from Terminal), and the ability to manipulate my OS's "ls" command, I'd choose the pretty OS every day. I wish we could have both, but now that we have to choose, that's my decision.

But that aside, I'm not sure about the rest of your complaints. I just created couple new folders and 5-6 files named gooba and gooba2 and typed 'chmod +x $(find . -name gooba)' and everything worked (gooba's are executable and gooba2's are not). I don't think that extra dot is that bad and I actually like it better (it's more logical).

Also, you can install package managers such as: MacPorts[1] or Homebrew[2] or Fink[3] (I prefer Homebrew). Then you can install htop, iotop, ftop, and a million other unix apps.

in 'top', if you press 'o' (order), and then 'cpu', it sorts them by CPU usage. You can even set a secondary key by pressing 'O'. And you can always "alias top='top -o cpu'" in your .aliases.

[1] http://www.macports.org/ports.php

[2] https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

[3] http://www.finkproject.org/
1 comments
kragen 5244 days ago
> If I had to choose between a pretty and easy to use OS (that lets me write programs in peace and not have to manually fix everything from Terminal), and the ability to manipulate my OS's "ls" command, I'd choose the pretty OS every day. I wish we could have both

Fortunately, you can: just use a current Debian on well-supported hardware. (Until a year ago I would have recommended Ubuntu.)

> I don't think that extra dot is that bad

There are a zillion things like that in MacOS that are just that little bit harder to use, for no good reason. Requiring five extra keystrokes in `top` to get an actual list of the top processes is another example. You can come up with justifications for why the roadblocks are there, or rationalize that they're not that bad, but they really add up.it

It's like Apple's vaunted relentless focus on user experience just doesn't extend to programmers.

> Also, you can install package managers such as: MacPorts[1] or Homebrew[2] or Fink[3] (I prefer Homebrew). Then you can install htop, iotop, ftop, and a million other unix apps.

If you're comparing MacPorts, Homebrew, and Fink to Debian or Ubuntu, I think you haven't used Debian or Ubuntu. I didn't realize iotop and htop had already been ported to MacOS, though. That's cool. Thanks for letting me know. Powertop, latencytop, strace, and dstat no, though, I guess?

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