I am just noting these here kinda for reference; so I can remember all the things that bug me about Mac OS X, primarily as differences from Mac OS.
- I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but the black I-bar cursor in Mac OS changes color as it passes over dark backgrounds. Now, in BBEdit in Mac OS X, it still does this, but in other apps it doesn't. I don't think it is Carbon vs. Cocoa, because other Carbon apps don't. The I-bar instead has a grey shadow or something, which makes it very difficult to see when the entire background is black. I often lose my cursor in Mac OS X.
- In many text boxes (such as cmd-~ from the Finder, to open a named directory, which in itself is cool), if you arrow left or right, the cursor disappears until I let go of the arrow key. So I can't hold down the arrow and move the cursor to a specific location, as I never know when to stop. Very annoying.
- I don't know of any way to do custom contextual menus. In Mac OS, I have these little files to handle all sorts of things; for instance, I can ctrl-click on a file and select "Open Using -> file2clip" and it puts the path for that item on my Clipboard. Or select text and choose "CPAN" and it will automatically search for that text on search.cpan.org. That is something I use a lot, and it doesn't appear to exist in Mac OS X.
contextual menus
wickline on 2002-08-16T14:45:03
> ctrl-click on a file and select "Open Using -> file2clip"
Either BBEdit or Bare Bones' Super Get Info shipped with an "Open With" CMM. When installed, it goes in "Contextual Menu Items" in your "Library" directory (you could probably promote it to the system lib to get it to work for all users). It's called "Bare Bones Open With.plugin". Google searching for other
.plugin things
might bring satisfaction.
If you don't have Bare Bones' open with cmm, and re-running installers isn't giving you that option, then there's a
free alternative.
Searching for cmm at
version tracker's MacOS X page might show some that come with source so you could figure out how to do your own.
> Or select text and choose "CPAN"
Another way to do this is with services. I don't think you'll be able to control-click, but you can assign keyboard shortcuts, which might be just as handy.
This one lets you select text and then search google. It comes with source so you could probably adapt it to have a version that does CPAN instead.
-matt
