I'm so metal, I hardlink *directories*

→ 05 September 2009. Tags: mac, osx

OSX only (Leopard and above). Apparently Apple added this for time machine’s use, but didn’t expose it in the ln tool.

Yes, this means you can shoot yourself (and your computer) in the foot (and, err, power supply). However, it has its uses as long as you take care.

Right now I'm using it to serve up content in my web sever that lives outside ~/Sites (because the content is a subfolder in a git repo, and I don’t want to have to keep mirroring it). This can’t be done with symlinks or aliases, as far as I could tell…

A thought or two about application launch window focus models

→ 22 August 2009. Tags: linux, osx

Note that here I'm talking about windows getting focus when they launch, rather than focus-follows-mouse or window click-through (I’ll leave that one to Gruber).

Recently, I've learnt something about how window focus works on OSX, and subsequently been fairly disappointed by how it works in X (and probably Windows, but correct me if I'm wrong).

OSX-style horizontal mouse scrolling for linux

→ 24 July 2009. Tags: programming, osx, linux

OSX has this great feature where if you hold down SHIFT at the same time as using your mouse scroll wheel, it’ll scroll horizontally instead of vertically. If you don’t have a laptop, this is an immensely useful trick. Sadly, I couldn’t find any way to get this to happen on linux.

But now, thanks to some direction from stackoverflow, I finally figured out how to do it myself. The world of X11 input hackery is somewhat twisted and full of projects either abandoned or in disrepair, but I finally stumbled across the right set of tools.

If you'd like to get this (rather excellent) feature in linux, you will need the following:

• Install the packages xbindkeys and xautomation: sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xautomation

• Save the following file as ~/.xbindkeysrc.scm :

  ; bind shift + vertical scroll to horizontal scroll events
  (xbindkey '(shift "b:4") "xte 'mouseclick 6'")
  (xbindkey '(shift "b:5") "xte 'mouseclick 7'")
  

• Use your favourite mechanism to ensure that the xbindkeys command is run at the beginning of your xsession (I added it to ubuntu’s “startup items” preference, but you can surely use init.d if you’re comfortable with that).

Trashy.app

→ 20 April 2008. Tags: application, programming, osx

In any OSX “document window”, there is a little icon representing the current document. If you click and hold this icon, it becomes a draggable alias for the file. You can then use that alias much as you would the file itself (as if you had dragged it from the finder) – but one thing you can’t do is delete the file by dropping it in the trash.

Trashy is a simple program to fix that. Put it in your dock, and it will send anything you drag onto it into the trash. Click here to download Trashy.

Here’s the entire source code applescript, if you’re curious (or just naturally suspicious of running random programs you found on internet, as you ought to be):

on open fileList
    tell application "Finder"
        repeat with f in fileList
            set n to 0
            repeat while class of f is alias file
                if n is less than 5 then
                    set n to n + 1
                    set f to original item of f
                end if
            end repeat
            move f to the trash
        end repeat
    end tell
end open

on run
    tell application "Finder" to open the trash
end run