General tips for new Mac users

Useful tools

• QuickSilver (try Colibri for Windows) http://quicksilver.en.softonic.com/mac, quickly starting applications, finding documents, no need to use mouse

• fink, package management, http://www.finkproject.org/

  http://cmg.soton.ac.uk/community/wiki/7/Pre-compiled_fink_trees

• macports, http://www.macports.org/

• OpenTerminalHere (opens terminal in current finder directory)

Useful facts

• Applications are subdirectories, executable in Contents/MacOS

• can open files/directories with open, override application with -a:

  open .
  

  opens the current directory in the finder:

  open -a textedit thisfile.txt
  

  opens file thisfile.txt in the textedit application:

  open thisfile.txt
  

  opens the file in the default application for extention .txt

Window handling

• close window Apple-w

• minimise: Apple-m

Application handling

• quit: Apple-q

• switch from application to next: Apple-TAB

Aquamacs

• full screen: Apple-Shift Return

• choose font: Apple-Shift t

Aqua (window manager)

• click and drag icon next to document in title bar of window to terminal to obtain full path in terminal window

• can use same trick to select directories or files to open or save in standard file open/save dialog windows

• use ‘OpenTerminalHere’ add-on (google for it) to open a terminal in the directory of the current finder window

Note that the ‘Apple’ key is called CMD on the most recent generation of hardware.

Keyboard not working

Symptom: all function keys work as expected, and so does the cursor control. You may even be able to control the mouse with the keyboard.

Is your keyboard broken? No, it is in a special ‘universal access mode’.

This page explains how to switch the mode on (just click ‘off’ to get rid of it).

MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger)

How to mount external harddrive from prompt?

Find out what the device number is (for example using mount). The output may read:

...
/dev/disk1s10 on /Volumes/Minmax250a (local, nodev, nosuid)
...

Then use this command:

/usr/sbin/diskutil mount /dev/disk1s10

and you are done.

How to mount a smb share?

For example like this:

mount_smbfs //username@smb.server.some.where/yourshare /Volumes/yourmountpoint

Where is X11? (Mac OS 10.4.8, Tiger)

Install Disk 1/System/Installation/Packages/X11User.pkg

Useful tools

Combine/merge pdfs into one file

http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml

pdf plugin for safari

http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/

skim (annotate pdf files and read them on screen)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/skim-app/

ftp (and sftp) client

http://cyberduck.ch/

How to install a smb printer that is not browsable?

from http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301397:

1. Open Printer Setup Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities).

2. Mac OS X 10.4.x users: Choose Add Printer from the Printers menu,
   then hold the Option key while clicking the "More Printers"
   button.

3. Choose Advanced from the first pop-up menu.

4. Choose Windows Printer via SAMBA from the Device pop-up menu.

5. In the Device Name field, type the name you would like to use for
   this printer in Mac OS X.

6. In the Device URI field, use one of the following formats to link
   to the printer:

   smb://user:password@workgroup/server/sharename
   smb://user:password@server/sharename
   smb://workgroup/server/sharename
   smb://server/sharename

   Notes: "user" is the name of a Windows user who has privileges to
   use the printer. "password" is the password of that Windows
   user. "workgroup" is the name of the Windows workgroup to which the
   computer sharing the printer belongs. "server" is the name of the
   computer sharing the printer or its IP address. "sharename" is the
   shared Windows printer's share name.

   Tip: You don't need a "workgroup" when specifying the IP address of
   the computer (such as when the printer is on a different subnet),
   or if your Mac belongs to the same Windows (SMB) workgroup.

7. Choose the appropriate PPD or printer driver from the Printer Model
   pop-up menu.

8. Click Add.

New slim keyboard (Autumn 2007) – where is the expose button to reveal the desktop?

This used to be F11. It is now CMD-F3.

Similarly, what used to be F9 is now F3, what used to be F10 is not CTRL-F3.

MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Full unix path in title bar of finder window. Set with

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Unset (i.e. return to default) with

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool NO

You need to relaunch the finder application to activate the change. (Tip taken from http://www.macworld.com/article/132443/2008/03/leopardsurvival1.html).

Change group membership from command line

Just to put people on the right track:

This command checks whether ‘myuser’ is a member of the group ‘mygroup’. It will reply with a full english sentence (“user is a member of the group” or “user is not a member of the group”). “):

$root> dsmemberutil checkmembership -U myuser -G mygroup

To add the user to the group, we can use (on Leopard, 10.5):

$root> dscl . -append /Groups/mygroup GroupMembership myuser

There is lots of examples out there (google), once one knows what to google for; plus the usual man pages, of course.

How to delete all iCal data?

Ical (on Mac OS X 10.5) stores data in:

• Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist

• Library/Preferences/iCalExternalSync.plist

• Library/Caches/com.apple.iCal

• Library/Calendars

Deleting all these files and subdirectories, seems to remove all the calendars from iCal. However, at some point, they seem to come back. (It seems that running ‘calaboration’ will trigger re-creating the old calendars, too). Where are they hiding?

• It seems that ‘isync’ keeps some memory of the calendars. On the test system, this could be fixed by running:

  /System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsync.pl full
  

  (following http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1627)

Known and less well knows shortcuts (key combinations) in Mac OS X

See http://davespicks.com/writing/programming/mackeys.html

Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Using locate

locate (and the automatic updating of the data base can be switched on using):

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

This message is displayed if one tries to use locate and the database does not exist yet.