5 ms·
Preface: I develop on a Mac. There is no easy way to answer this question. You can definitely get a more powerful PC for the price. With the Mac, you are buyin
by SoftwareMaven 16y ago
Preface: I develop on a Mac.
There is no easy way to answer this question. You can definitely get a more powerful PC for the price. With the Mac, you are buying some brand, some better construction, and a lot of better customer service. You are also buying OS X, which may or may not be attractive.
I used Linux for many years as a primary development machine, and it was great. Ubuntu is doing a good job solving the "there is no good desktop for Linux" that was pretty true five years ago.
That said, I prefer my Mac because I get almost the same ability to play at the command line (I spend most of my day in Emacs right now, including running my shells there), but I also get a refined experience when I'm interacting with applications outside of development (e.g. Garage Band, Pages, Keynote, etc).
In the end, I didn't switch for development, I switched for all the time I use my laptop when I'm not developing. For me, it was worth it, but YMMV.
- abstractfactory 16y agoThread hijack... If you use Emacs all day on a Mac, what do you use for the Meta key? I find I'm not really happy no matter what I do. If I make Option into Meta, I have to bend my thumb way under my palm to hit Meta. If I make Command into Meta, then I lose access to lots of global Mac UI shortcuts. I guess I could experiment with swapping Option and Command and then using Option as Meta, although I'll have to retrain a lot of muscle memory. And then there's the fact that one Emacs window in a terminal is still not as productive as five Emacs windows under X11, and X11.app still sucks, and the various native Mac Emacs ports still don't feel right to me. Overall I find using Emacs on Linux X11 still provides the best Emacs experience. This alone will probably keep me on Linux as my primary work environment for the foreseeable future.
- hollerith 16y agoI use Escape because it is in exactly the same place on almost all PC and Mac keyboards. Yeah, I know that Escape is not a proper modifier key.
- pnathan 16y agoFor me- * Meta is mapped to the Command key (and the option key). * Control is mapped to control. * I suppose I should try to remap the Fn key to be Control to really make it work right instead of the weird curve that currently has to happen. When I really am interested in getting typing done I hook up a MS Natural 4K. It's a much more pleasant experience. My keybindings are customized for maximum ease there (and believe me, my hands/wrists do not hurt after a long-term coding session there). Laptops are fine for messing around for a while, but after a period of typing my hands hurt.