Tag Archives: os x

The End of OS X

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Today I read The End of OS X. I particularly liked the bit about the Unix philosophy:

  1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
  2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
  3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
  4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.

Fixing meta-keys in Vim via Mac OS X Terminal.app

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So I configured Terminal.app to use Option (Alt) as Meta key: Terminal => Preferences => Profiles => Keyboard => Use Option as Meta key

But wasn’t working for the key-bindings in my .vimrc:

nmap <M-j> mz:m+<cr>`z
nmap <M-k> mz:m-2<cr>`z

So I found this article: Fix meta-keys that break out of Insert mode and ended up with the following snippet for my .vimrc which fixed my Meta-key problem:

let c='a'
while c <= 'z'
  exec "set <M-".tolower(c).">=\e".c
  exec "imap \e".c." <M-".tolower(c).">"
  let c = nr2char(1+char2nr(c))
endw

Everything is easy when you know how!