Wednesday, February 28, 2007 
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I ordered a 17" Mac Book Pro on Friday night. It shipped from Shanghai on Monday and arrived at work this morning. Scha-weet! And spendy.

I've been busy ramping up all day. I estimate that my total lifetime usage of Macs was about one day before today. I definitely have some new habits to learn.

So far, I've installed Mac Vim, Firefox (browser), Camino (browser), Thunderbird (email), Quicksilver (fast launch utility), Witch (window switcher), AntiRSI (RSI preventer), Adium (multi-protocol chat), Skype (Internet telephony), Remote Desktop Connection (connecting to Windows desktops), StuffIt Expander (for classic archives), and KeePassX (password manager).

Some of these have built-in equivalents of course, but I'm using these for compatibility with my existing Windows and Linux setups and data (e.g., Thunderbird, KeePassX) or because I'm too entrenched to change (Vim).

posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 7:35:58 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
#    Comments [5]
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Thursday, March 01, 2007 5:18:48 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Check out the "Keychain" app rather than KeePassX - it's rather nice once you get used to it. Also: Quicksilver is so much more than a quick launcher - play with it for a bit and you will discover that you can do pretty much anything in 5 keystrokes with quicksilver!

Congrats on the new mac - I remember when I got my first powerbook - one of the best things I ever did.
Thursday, March 01, 2007 5:20:19 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Also: Check out TextMate. It's the one application in the world that might make you give up VIM! IT's hard to explain textmate, but check out some of the videos on the site. It's got the hardcore technical abilities of Vi (and more) and the elegance of a mac!
Thursday, March 01, 2007 8:26:13 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I was never able to get Keychain to do anything ...

... and I had a mac laptop for a couple weeks, but sold it (recovering only 65% of what I paid, damn it) because it just didn't seem nice enough to warrant all the money I'd paid for it.
Friday, March 02, 2007 7:40:26 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I would probably like Keychain. However, I have ~250 entries in my KeePass database and I move it constantly between my Windows and Linux machines. Unless Keychain can read and write KeePass files (which I haven't checked), it's of no value to me.

I've heard good things about Textmate. My real investment with Vim is not so much the various extensions -- though they are important -- as the muscle memory. I have over 20 years of deep-seated keystrokes from the vi family: 'dd' to delete a line, 'w' to move forward a word, 'c3w' to change 3 words, and many many more that I don't consciously think about. Until I reflexively attempt them in any other editor and leave line noise spattered over my document. When I program in C# at work, I generally use Visual Studio with ViEmu, a vi emulator. Such is the power of habit.
Friday, March 23, 2007 9:33:41 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Checkout Quicksilver. I wouldnt be able to operate my Mac without it these days. http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
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