Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

The year was… 2000? I was using the fluxbox window manager on multiple screens. Probably running gentoo, distcc… lot’s of magic in those days. dot-com bubble burst, 9/11, choosing to go to grad school…

Led me to much happiness, but away from using Linux on the desktop when my wonderful research group bestowed a first generation MacBook Pro on me.

Well, I was going to make this longer, but in essence, get some cool software from irradiatedsoftware.com/ Like SizeUp or Cinch. SizeUp is more powerful, but Cinch has a better UI. I wish they’d combine the two. Then set your terminal to focus follows mouse with:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES


In your Terminal window. Then at least between terminals that you have gridded out, your focus will be under your cursor. Still no explanation why the scroll wheel will work (and not switch focus) and other oddities of OS X. Which aren’t necessarily wrong, just not what I would choose if I were in charge of the OS.

It’s hard to say, though, overall which is a better user experience. I have seen some young whippersnappers with their Lenovo Linux laptops, set up with minimal window managers emulating OS X… but there is a benefit to the limited choices of OS X. I sound like such an old fogey Mac apologist for saying it, but the fact that I can hop on any OS X machine from 10.3-10.6 and have a similar experience, is a marked change from logging into an Ubuntu machine from those same eras.

Perhaps that’s an over generalization, but you get what I mean. I was there with GNOME 1 and KDE 2, etc… and honestly I remember liking KDE 2 more than just about any other GUI ever. But then they had to complicate it, more and more… to the point where I was using blackbox (then fluxbox) …

And around we go.