10 ms·

I really tried to like macOS for an entire year. I used Yabai[1] as tilling window manager which is much better than Amethyst mentioned in the article. I also w

I really tried to like macOS for an entire year. I used Yabai[1] as tilling window manager which is much better than Amethyst mentioned in the article. I also wrote my own compose key tool macos-compose[2] and rofi-like clone choosem[3] (eventually bought into Alfred). Yet with all of this effort I still went back to linux after a year (Arch with Qtile and Gnome). What really killed macos for me was the fact that animations could not be disabled entirely and everything felt like it's behind several ms of a delay. I work on the move so I don't have the luxury of multi-screen setup so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts. Now I run simple Lenovo yoga laptop with arch+qtile+gnome and honestly, my performance at work at least doubled. That's my anecdote anyway. 1 - https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai 2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose 3 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/choosem https://github.com/Granitosaurus/choosem

gammadist 5y ago
The animations are a real pain. Who decided to make the animation to switch desktops almost one second in length?
- hatf0 5y ago
  Have you ever tried “Reduce Motion” in Accessibility -> Display?
  - gammadist 5y ago
    Yes. Instead of a sliding animation with a one second duration, I get a crossfade animation with a one second duration.
    - aniforprez 5y ago
      This. I keep typing right after I switch screens and it ALWAYS misses the first couple of keys. It's absolutely infuriating
      - aidos 5y ago
        Is this when using fullscreen apps / spaces? I exist entirely between iterm and chrome, so I use iterms non-native fullscreen so that it’s fast to switch otherwise the OS lag is unbearable.
    - ralfd 5y ago
      ctrl+Number is the fastest way to switch Spaces out of the box. Some third party apps (Total Spaces) get rid of all animations.
- unvs 5y ago
  Out of frustration for this, I wrote Craig Federighi an email some years back. I asked if it was possible to just disable the spaces animation without disabling ALL animations, since the rolling animation makes me nauseous. Previously I had used yabai, but it needed to disable SIP in order to switch without an animation, which was a no-go for me. He responded with several follow up questions, but nothing came of it unfortunately… Hopefully it’s on someone’s task list somewhere
- 9935c101ab17a66 5y ago
  You used to be able to modify a plist to change the duration of things like switching spaces. It stopped working around 10.14 and I really miss it.
nvarsj 5y ago
Yeah, same here. I'm now on an AMD X13 gen 2 and it's fantastic. I can't get temp to go past 68 degrees even with all 8x2 cores at 100% on performance profile. Fan is also completely silent and only goes on with sustained usage. Why deal with the pain of a poor WM/DE (OS X) and all the arm nonsense when you can get excellent thermals and performance w/ a Linux laptop.
- lytedev 5y ago
  How is battery life?
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    My 16 inch Lenovo with a Ryzen 5800H is good for about 10 hours of light web development That said, I am not one to have their high refresh rate screen at anywhere near even mid brightness levels. That includes desktop, TV, phone, etc
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  How much does the processor scale down when you hit 68C for a while?
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    why should it?
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      At least with the mobile Intel processors I'm familiar with, things like Turbo Boost get disabled and the cores will be scaled down in order to bring temperatures down. I figured AMD would do something similar, but I have no experience with their mobile processors. According to Wikipedia, AMD's Turbo Core feature depends on power draw, while Precision Boost and Extended Frequency Range features depends on power and temperature. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Turbo_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Turbo_Core
dev_tty01 5y ago
As far as window management, tiling, etc., I use BetterSnapTool. No relation to the developer, just a user for many years. https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool
- mpalczewski 5y ago
  I've been liking Magnet. I have an ultra wide monitor and being able to 3 vertical terminal windows all 1/3 screen in size is nice.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I've been using tiles for a while, it works pretty well
niij 5y ago
You can disable animations when switching between spaces. I use skhd for this to map the hotkeys to the Yabai command to switch spaces. Pressing f13 goes to the previous space immediately and f14 to the next space. 1. Install Yabai 2. install skhd 3. disable SIP (ugh): https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-Integrity-Protection https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... 4. add `f13 : yabai -m space --focus prev` and `f14 : yabai -m space --focus next` to your `~/.skhdrc` file.
- wraptile 5y ago
  I've tried this and much more but there's still noticable delay compared to Linux' twms and it's not only about workspace switching. There's this huge thread on stackoverflow[1] which is a great illustration of what a mess macos display server is. 1 - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-off-all-animations-on-os-x https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-...
foepys 5y ago
It's incredible how sluggish animations can make a OS feel. The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone is enabling the developer options and turning off all animations. The phone feels a lot faster then, especially switching apps. I have more than one friend who I showed this and they suddenly didn't feel the need to replace their phone with a newer, faster one.
- richardfey 5y ago
  You can disable them also from Accessibility
  - jmnicolas 5y ago
    Thank you for this, my phone feels 2x faster now!
    - richardfey 5y ago
      I just found out this myself and giving it a try. Don't think I will miss the animations :)
- mgradowski 5y ago
  I have found this setting to break some apps (e.g. Spotify, my bank's app) though.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    Same here. Would be nice to be able to do it on an app-by-app basis, or add exceptions.
Findeton 5y ago
They can pry my Linux from my dead cold hands. I want to be the master of my computer, as it is an extension of myself. I'll thus use an open source OS.
Jnr 5y ago
10 years ago I bought Macbook Air to install and run Arch Linux on it. Since at that time Linus Torvalds was also using Macbooks and they were on Intel platform, it had all the drivers available. Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. Then I got upgraded version in 2019, and that one has even worse support. During that time I had to get used to macOS, but I simply could not. Those animations or something else make it feel so slow in comparison to Linux desktop. Then once pandemic hit and I started working from home, I could use my Linux desktop for work. It feels so much better. I am not sure why macOS feels so sluggish in comparison. Now I am hoping for Asahi Linux to support the new M1 Macbooks well enough to use them on a daily basis, but not sure if it will ever happen. I think the main thing that is missing is the GPU driver. I have not yet seen a good community build open source GPU driver that has decent performance.
- asddubs 5y ago
  is it actually necessary, if you're using it for work (assuming you don't do anything heavily gpu dependent)? Supposedly asahi works pretty well even with just a framebuffer, being powered entirely by the CPU. I probably wouldn't want to run that, but even an inefficient gpu driver should probably be fine for office type work, as long as it's not glitchy, right?
  - Jnr 5y ago
    Will see how it goes. I remember how AMD open source driver started more than 10 years ago. It was not a pleasant experience on my machine. Even now on AMD APU box that I use for gaming - GPU driver crashes at least once a month. I hope that people behind Asahi will have better luck. :)
    - asddubs 5y ago
      they do have the advantage of having a much smaller range of hardware to support
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. interesting, the MBP 2014 is what I will forever remember as "one of the best computer I ran linux on". With archlinux almost everything worked from the very beginning except the webcam driver, and much faster than macOS. It just took some time for Chrome and Firefox to adapt to Retina because those weren't following Xft.dpi system property, but otherwise...
xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
> so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts. My kingdom for a way to cmd-tab through all windows. Truly horrific stuff.
- deergomoo 5y ago
  https://contexts.co/ https://contexts.co/ Enjoy! I actually use it for the opposite function—to make cmd+` better at switching between windows within the same app—but it works great as an alternative cmd+tab if “window switcher” fits your mental model better than “app switcher”.
- Veen 5y ago
  You're probably aware of this already, but if you command tab to an app you can use the up and down cursor keys to display all open windows for that app. You can also use command+` to cycle through open windows of the focused app.
  - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    I had forgotten about this, it's a bit fiddly but absolutely worth mentioning. Why there isn't just an option to have cmd-tab show all windows is beyond me. As someone with sometimes several browser windows and often dozens of terminals open, this is just so painful.
- wlonkly 5y ago
  https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ will do that for you.
midrus 5y ago
Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work, macOS is great and very easy to use and gives you zero problems but you have to adapt to it. I've also moved after many years of linux and I could not be happier. I like easy and I like to focus on getting my actual work done, I got tired of spending weeks personalizing stuff, dealing with drivers issues, tuning the trackpad, adjusting applications to work with different dpi screens, etc, etc. For me it was a never ending war and a lot of time wasted.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Exactly the same story here. It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.
  - fearface 5y ago
    Same story here, and little anecdote: In a pure mac shop we had a guy apply and he brought his Linux notebook and 5mins into the interview he started hating on hiw bad macos is. Before he had to show some of his work in his linux notebook we had a little coffebreak, after we came back somehow LUKS crashed he wasn’t able to boot the system or restore the disk. We gave him a USB Stick and 3hrs to solve it or admit that he was wrong about bashing macos.
    - knolan 5y ago
      Similar experience when applying for a job at a major UK university back in 2009. My Dell laptop with Ubuntu crashed when trying to present my slides. There was an old iMac at the back of the room taunting me. I ended up working there through a different route and bought a 2010 13” MBP that served me perfectly for four years before I sold it for an impressive amount of cash to buy a 2014 15” which was also flawless.
  - BadOakOx 5y ago
ad-astra 5y ago
FWIW Monterey on a 13” M1 Pro felt incredibly tight compared to any model I’ve tried before.
Wilem82 5y ago
I’m in a team where every member was forced into macOS against their will, because a lot of project scripts were hardcoded for macOS by a long-gone “architect”. My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm) - macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager - I’ve had terrible experience with Apple’s customer support in the past where they couldn’t fix broken font antialiasing for external monitors - I’ve been plagued by serious macOS bugs where it would cause 100% cpu load that could only be cured with closing/reopening the lid, and there are still some sleep-related bugs in it, whereas on Windows everything’s fine - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows - All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it - Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable - GUI feels slow compared to Windows
- masklinn 5y ago
  > - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm) 'bit of a duh, that. > My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: [...] macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager ... FAR doesn't work on linux either, the unofficial linux port (of 2.0) advertises macOS support, and midnight commander works everywhere. > - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows BigSur added a tiling system, but it's really just a split-window fullscreen (so you can't have one half of the screen full and the rest mixed-purpose). Much easier to use a tiler like divvy or BetterSnapTool. Then again I find windows' tiling just as useless as macos' though it's less prescriptive, I use PowerToys' FancyZones there. > All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason That's next-level dishonest. There are excellent reasons for it: 1. macos was first 2. macos has always dedicated its own modkey to system-level shortcuts 3. this also makes ctrl and opt (alt) much more regular and convenient The windows key is a half-assed aping of it. > And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
molszanski 5y ago
> 2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose > Mac os doesn't come with a compose key feature built-in There is is pretty handy, built-in, text replacement tool. Settings -> Keyboard -> Text Here are my top "compose" shortcuts "_shrug -> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and "_stare -> ಠ_ಠ" :)
- midrus 5y ago
  Great tip! Didn't know this. Thanks!
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  And these sync over to your iOS devices too, where the shortcuts are even more time saving.
- masklinn 5y ago
  There's also a "unicode hex input" keyboard, though it takes over the entirety of the option mapping (option-[0-9a-f] becomes a charcode, the rest has no effect).

gammadist 5y ago

The animations are a real pain. Who decided to make the animation to switch desktops almost one second in length?

hatf0 5y ago
Have you ever tried “Reduce Motion” in Accessibility -> Display?
- gammadist 5y ago
  Yes. Instead of a sliding animation with a one second duration, I get a crossfade animation with a one second duration.
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    This. I keep typing right after I switch screens and it ALWAYS misses the first couple of keys. It's absolutely infuriating
    - aidos 5y ago
      Is this when using fullscreen apps / spaces? I exist entirely between iterm and chrome, so I use iterms non-native fullscreen so that it’s fast to switch otherwise the OS lag is unbearable.
  - ralfd 5y ago
    ctrl+Number is the fastest way to switch Spaces out of the box. Some third party apps (Total Spaces) get rid of all animations.
unvs 5y ago
Out of frustration for this, I wrote Craig Federighi an email some years back. I asked if it was possible to just disable the spaces animation without disabling ALL animations, since the rolling animation makes me nauseous. Previously I had used yabai, but it needed to disable SIP in order to switch without an animation, which was a no-go for me. He responded with several follow up questions, but nothing came of it unfortunately… Hopefully it’s on someone’s task list somewhere
9935c101ab17a66 5y ago
You used to be able to modify a plist to change the duration of things like switching spaces. It stopped working around 10.14 and I really miss it.

nvarsj 5y ago

Yeah, same here. I'm now on an AMD X13 gen 2 and it's fantastic. I can't get temp to go past 68 degrees even with all 8x2 cores at 100% on performance profile. Fan is also completely silent and only goes on with sustained usage. Why deal with the pain of a poor WM/DE (OS X) and all the arm nonsense when you can get excellent thermals and performance w/ a Linux laptop.

lytedev 5y ago
How is battery life?
- beebeepka 5y ago
  My 16 inch Lenovo with a Ryzen 5800H is good for about 10 hours of light web development That said, I am not one to have their high refresh rate screen at anywhere near even mid brightness levels. That includes desktop, TV, phone, etc
heavyset_go 5y ago
How much does the processor scale down when you hit 68C for a while?
- hansel_der 5y ago
  why should it?
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    At least with the mobile Intel processors I'm familiar with, things like Turbo Boost get disabled and the cores will be scaled down in order to bring temperatures down. I figured AMD would do something similar, but I have no experience with their mobile processors. According to Wikipedia, AMD's Turbo Core feature depends on power draw, while Precision Boost and Extended Frequency Range features depends on power and temperature. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Turbo_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Turbo_Core

dev_tty01 5y ago

As far as window management, tiling, etc., I use BetterSnapTool. No relation to the developer, just a user for many years. https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool

mpalczewski 5y ago
I've been liking Magnet. I have an ultra wide monitor and being able to 3 vertical terminal windows all 1/3 screen in size is nice.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I've been using tiles for a while, it works pretty well

niij 5y ago

You can disable animations when switching between spaces. I use skhd for this to map the hotkeys to the Yabai command to switch spaces. Pressing f13 goes to the previous space immediately and f14 to the next space. 1. Install Yabai 2. install skhd 3. disable SIP (ugh): https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-Integrity-Protection https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... 4. add `f13 : yabai -m space --focus prev` and `f14 : yabai -m space --focus next` to your `~/.skhdrc` file.

wraptile 5y ago
I've tried this and much more but there's still noticable delay compared to Linux' twms and it's not only about workspace switching. There's this huge thread on stackoverflow[1] which is a great illustration of what a mess macos display server is. 1 - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-off-all-animations-on-os-x https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-...

foepys 5y ago

It's incredible how sluggish animations can make a OS feel. The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone is enabling the developer options and turning off all animations. The phone feels a lot faster then, especially switching apps. I have more than one friend who I showed this and they suddenly didn't feel the need to replace their phone with a newer, faster one.

richardfey 5y ago
You can disable them also from Accessibility
- jmnicolas 5y ago
  Thank you for this, my phone feels 2x faster now!
  - richardfey 5y ago
    I just found out this myself and giving it a try. Don't think I will miss the animations :)
mgradowski 5y ago
I have found this setting to break some apps (e.g. Spotify, my bank's app) though.
- Shared404 5y ago
  Same here. Would be nice to be able to do it on an app-by-app basis, or add exceptions.

Findeton 5y ago

They can pry my Linux from my dead cold hands. I want to be the master of my computer, as it is an extension of myself. I'll thus use an open source OS.

Jnr 5y ago

10 years ago I bought Macbook Air to install and run Arch Linux on it. Since at that time Linus Torvalds was also using Macbooks and they were on Intel platform, it had all the drivers available. Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. Then I got upgraded version in 2019, and that one has even worse support. During that time I had to get used to macOS, but I simply could not. Those animations or something else make it feel so slow in comparison to Linux desktop. Then once pandemic hit and I started working from home, I could use my Linux desktop for work. It feels so much better. I am not sure why macOS feels so sluggish in comparison. Now I am hoping for Asahi Linux to support the new M1 Macbooks well enough to use them on a daily basis, but not sure if it will ever happen. I think the main thing that is missing is the GPU driver. I have not yet seen a good community build open source GPU driver that has decent performance.

asddubs 5y ago
is it actually necessary, if you're using it for work (assuming you don't do anything heavily gpu dependent)? Supposedly asahi works pretty well even with just a framebuffer, being powered entirely by the CPU. I probably wouldn't want to run that, but even an inefficient gpu driver should probably be fine for office type work, as long as it's not glitchy, right?
- Jnr 5y ago
  Will see how it goes. I remember how AMD open source driver started more than 10 years ago. It was not a pleasant experience on my machine. Even now on AMD APU box that I use for gaming - GPU driver crashes at least once a month. I hope that people behind Asahi will have better luck. :)
  - asddubs 5y ago
    they do have the advantage of having a much smaller range of hardware to support
jcelerier 5y ago
> Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. interesting, the MBP 2014 is what I will forever remember as "one of the best computer I ran linux on". With archlinux almost everything worked from the very beginning except the webcam driver, and much faster than macOS. It just took some time for Chrome and Firefox to adapt to Retina because those weren't following Xft.dpi system property, but otherwise...

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago

> so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts. My kingdom for a way to cmd-tab through all windows. Truly horrific stuff.

deergomoo 5y ago
https://contexts.co/ https://contexts.co/ Enjoy! I actually use it for the opposite function—to make cmd+` better at switching between windows within the same app—but it works great as an alternative cmd+tab if “window switcher” fits your mental model better than “app switcher”.
Veen 5y ago
You're probably aware of this already, but if you command tab to an app you can use the up and down cursor keys to display all open windows for that app. You can also use command+` to cycle through open windows of the focused app.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  I had forgotten about this, it's a bit fiddly but absolutely worth mentioning. Why there isn't just an option to have cmd-tab show all windows is beyond me. As someone with sometimes several browser windows and often dozens of terminals open, this is just so painful.
wlonkly 5y ago
https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ will do that for you.

midrus 5y ago

Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work, macOS is great and very easy to use and gives you zero problems but you have to adapt to it. I've also moved after many years of linux and I could not be happier. I like easy and I like to focus on getting my actual work done, I got tired of spending weeks personalizing stuff, dealing with drivers issues, tuning the trackpad, adjusting applications to work with different dpi screens, etc, etc. For me it was a never ending war and a lot of time wasted.

hughrr 5y ago
Exactly the same story here. It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.
- fearface 5y ago
  Same story here, and little anecdote: In a pure mac shop we had a guy apply and he brought his Linux notebook and 5mins into the interview he started hating on hiw bad macos is. Before he had to show some of his work in his linux notebook we had a little coffebreak, after we came back somehow LUKS crashed he wasn’t able to boot the system or restore the disk. We gave him a USB Stick and 3hrs to solve it or admit that he was wrong about bashing macos.
  - knolan 5y ago
    Similar experience when applying for a job at a major UK university back in 2009. My Dell laptop with Ubuntu crashed when trying to present my slides. There was an old iMac at the back of the room taunting me. I ended up working there through a different route and bought a 2010 13” MBP that served me perfectly for four years before I sold it for an impressive amount of cash to buy a 2014 15” which was also flawless.
- BadOakOx 5y ago

ad-astra 5y ago

FWIW Monterey on a 13” M1 Pro felt incredibly tight compared to any model I’ve tried before.

Wilem82 5y ago

I’m in a team where every member was forced into macOS against their will, because a lot of project scripts were hardcoded for macOS by a long-gone “architect”. My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm) - macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager - I’ve had terrible experience with Apple’s customer support in the past where they couldn’t fix broken font antialiasing for external monitors - I’ve been plagued by serious macOS bugs where it would cause 100% cpu load that could only be cured with closing/reopening the lid, and there are still some sleep-related bugs in it, whereas on Windows everything’s fine - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows - All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it - Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable - GUI feels slow compared to Windows

masklinn 5y ago
> - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm) 'bit of a duh, that. > My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: [...] macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager ... FAR doesn't work on linux either, the unofficial linux port (of 2.0) advertises macOS support, and midnight commander works everywhere. > - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows BigSur added a tiling system, but it's really just a split-window fullscreen (so you can't have one half of the screen full and the rest mixed-purpose). Much easier to use a tiler like divvy or BetterSnapTool. Then again I find windows' tiling just as useless as macos' though it's less prescriptive, I use PowerToys' FancyZones there. > All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason That's next-level dishonest. There are excellent reasons for it: 1. macos was first 2. macos has always dedicated its own modkey to system-level shortcuts 3. this also makes ctrl and opt (alt) much more regular and convenient The windows key is a half-assed aping of it. > And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it

molszanski 5y ago

> 2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose > Mac os doesn't come with a compose key feature built-in There is is pretty handy, built-in, text replacement tool. Settings -> Keyboard -> Text Here are my top "compose" shortcuts "_shrug -> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and "_stare -> ಠ_ಠ" :)

midrus 5y ago
Great tip! Didn't know this. Thanks!
kitsunesoba 5y ago
And these sync over to your iOS devices too, where the shortcuts are even more time saving.
masklinn 5y ago
There's also a "unicode hex input" keyboard, though it takes over the entirety of the option mapping (option-[0-9a-f] becomes a charcode, the rest has no effect).