I remember the first time I saw Spotlight. It was magic. Then came Expose. Wireless that worked. Sleep that worked. Trivial configuration of things like sshd, apache and samba.

Amazing days.

Lately I only upgrade when forced. I ran 10.8 until earlier this year when I finally upgraded my machine. Then I spent a week trying to figure out how the hell to get gdb working again because binaries now require code signing and there's this horrible new thing called System Integrity Protection that tries to protect me from myself. They also took away my Escape key and replaced it with this TouchBar nonsens just because I wanted an i7 CPU. To put this into perspective: I practically live inside vim.

Remap single tap CAPS to ESC and when used in combination with another key or long-pressed - CTRL. This has changed the way I use my keyboard in vim and tmux.

I'm doing this on Ubuntu, but there are ways to get it done on OSX too.

I have `jk` mapped to ESC in spacemacs, zsh and anything else I can set up to use vi keybindings. `jk` is essentially a no-op in vi, so rebinding it doesn't cause any issues while carrying the advantage that my fingers never have to leave the home row.

Out of curiosity, how do you type "Dijkstra" in that case?

I've never typed Dijkstra in Vim, but if I had to, there are two reasonable options:

1. Wait a half-second after typing the "j". That causes the mapping to time out and you can type the "k" without a problem.

2. Type something like Dijj<del>kstra.

Copy and paste from another window? If your use of the word "Dijkstra" is frequent enough for this method to bother you, there must be other mappings that would work.

I have a similar key binding set up. One option is to press a key that doesn't do anything in between.

I loved his solution until this. This is a deal breaker. Time to go back to the abbacus. ;)

It’s even easier now; the keyboard prefs in settings allows caps to esc reassignment through the UI.

Do you have any hints on how one might implement this on mac OS? I'd love to have my keyboard configured like this...

you can do it with the app karabiner elements.

once installed, open the app, and go to the "complex modifications" tab. then click "add rule". then click "import more rules from the internet". on the web site that opens, expand "Modifier Keys". import "Change caps_lock key".

that'll give you a rule to do what you want in karabiner. (the rule is "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".)

It’s in keyboard modifier keys.

that'll get you caps-as-control, but not caps-as-control-AND-escape (unless they've added that in high sierra, but I don't think so).

Ctrl-c can be used as esc in vim

SIP is protecting you from rootkits. And it’s pretty trivial to turn off if you want to do that.

Details? Unless you’re developing malware or low-level system extensions SIP should have no impact on day to day work.

“All sorts of things” is a broad statement to toss around without at least some links. I primarily work in python and had never even heard of the py2app issue since it’s not an incredibly common tool and most python developers I know use newer versions of python.

That’s why I questioned the original broad claim: I know there are edge cases but most of the developers I know work on Macs and SIP just isn’t mentioned often enough for it to be anywhere near as bad in general as a few random commenters claim, not to mention that anyone I know who’s at all security savvy appreciates that it’s a trade off rather than a unilateral bad move.

I develop against the deployment environment run in virtual machines for two reasons.

1) Too many packages/servers/etc. I've tried to install under OS X over the years just didn't quite work right. That's probably not the case so much any more, but I have experienced it recently.

2) Developing against a macOS localhost can mask problems associated with my code running in the deployment environment. So to avoid those surprises, I develop against the deployment environment.

If I need root for package install or other server deployments, I log into the VM and do it there. I rarely need to install stuff on my macOS workstation.

Re: #1 that’s been generally smooth for me since Homebrew stabilized but I think your second point is key: it’s faster to develop locally but you definitely want to have some regular test that you’re in sync with the actual deployment environment. Docker has made that pretty easy now that the Mac Docker app is solid.

Brew is what I was alluding to, they have straightened out much of the package management issues. I ran into problems recently where certain CPAN modules wouldn't compile under OS X.

What kind of work are you doing that you need to fertle around in macOS's system folders (etc) all the time?

Use Ctrl-C instead of Esc - you don't even have to move your hands off the home position

>This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me.

There's a whole new FS that went into production in something like 4-5 years (unheard of) among lots of over things...

I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.

I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.

If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install.

Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.

If I'd like to stick with HFS+ for now, do I have the option to during the upgrade? I dual boot with Windows and I'm worried about something getting messed up and am not sure if there's a way to read APFS from Windows yet (I back up of course, but want to avoid potential issues)

Update: I upgraded, and everything happened automatically. No option to opt out of APFS conversion so yeah, if that effects your workflow you should know that. Went without a hitch for me though!

There is not any way to read APFS from Windows.

You do have backups, right?

Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.

I've been finding the same with iOS updates lately. iOS 11 has some nice improvements, imho, but they're not any major advancements, just the usual incremental improvements. Could have just called it iOS 10.4 and be done with it. That wouldn't be PR-friendly enough though.

If you have an iPad the iOS 11 update is huge. Being able to run two apps side-by-side with drag and drop supported across the system is a fundamental change to how you interact with stuff.

The new dock and changes to the multitasking interface and behavior take some getting used to, but my iPad feels like a much more powerful device than it did a week ago.

I do have an iPad on which I've been using the 11 beta for the past few months and I love the new multitasking support, but is it really big enough to warrant a major version bump?

You already could run two apps side by side in iOS 10 (I was a pretty heavy user of that feature, which is incidentally also the primary reason I opted into the beta), it just wasn't quite as flexible. Drag and drop is new, for sure. I suppose I haven't used it much so haven't really noticed it.

The dock seems like a small improvement over the old dock, added because of the better multitasking.

They're great improvements for sure, but they still seem like incremental improvements to me.

Everything Apple has done since iOS was first introduced (or arguably the initial iPad support in iOS 3.2 ) has been incremental improvements. But drag and drop is one of the bigger ones, IMO on-par with the initial multitasking support which incidentally was the update that finally convinced me to buy an iPad.

For an example of where this smooths things out, I've been using Readdle's Documents as an approximation of a local filesystem for a while now. Saving an image to that before was tricky; iOS doesn't have a way to isolate an image out of a page, just copy or save to camera roll. So you could save to camera roll and then import it over, but you lose the filename in the process and replace it with something generic like "Image 10". Or you can do weird workarounds like using Workflow's "Get images from page", which pulls up a slideshow of all the images on the page, which you then get to scroll through and find the one you wanted.

Now you just drag it and put it straight into the destination. You can also drag the URL bar over, which saves the URL as a new text file.

And if I have data in Documents that I want to use elsewhere, there's no shenanigans required with piping it through share sheets, I just drag it out and use it.

If you want something less permanent than a file manager, the popover multitasking is also a good platform for temporary "shelf" style data buckets. I'm currently trying Scrawl Pouch, but I've seen a couple others that looked equally nice. It's basically intended as a drag-and-drop destination to temporarily store any type of data until you want to drag it back out somewhere else.

This can be the obvious stuff like images and links from Safari, PDFs and other files out of Documents. You can also drop things like map pins, which can be shared via messages or email or dropped as links into Pages documents. I haven't experimented a lot with 3rd party apps, but presumably we'll see this show up in other ecosystems, maybe dropping things like audio effects between a family of media creation tools, or someone could make a 3rd party service for sharing paintbrush presets that you could drop into Procreate.

They've also brought in the "spring-loaded folders" behavior from Finder for this. If you're dragging a URL and you want to add it as a Safari bookmark, you can hover it over the sidebar button to pop it open and then navigate to the folder where you want to drop and save it. Or after the sidebar opens, you can hover over the Reading List tab to put it there instead of bookmarks. It's integrated like that throughout the entire OS.

A whole lot of things that just weren't possible on iOS are now a 2-second interaction.

Addendum on spring-loaded folders, you can even swipe up from the bottom to open the dock and then spring open another app. If you open Mail you can tap the new message button while still dragging the data, and then drop it into the new message popover. So splitscreen and slide over multitasking aren't even required to use drag and drop.

Ok that's fair. I suppose the update seemed less to me because I haven't needed the drag and drop for my workflow (basically I don't find myself needing to copy files/images very much and the documents I author on iPad are typically text only), so I guess this feature kinda slipped by me a bit.

I actually haven't used half that stuff yet, just discovered the depth of spring loading and the weird objects it supports (contacts / maps) while I was writing that comment. But even for smoother handling of text, images, and PDF files I really like this feature.

As a downside, the interface for picking up multiple objects feels a bit weird and is probably one of the bigger learning curves that iOS has gotten.

Another example I just found - you can drag an email (or several) from Mail over to Documents where they're saved as .eml files. Documents doesn't know how to render these so you see the full markup, but I can imagine that would be a useful feature for something.

Maybe a utility app to view full email headers? I don't think Mail.app has a way to get into those.

Snow Leopard was a boring release, but a very nice OS. This release feels like it might be similar.

Snow Leopard freed up something like 12 GB of space. I was impressed.