how far have mac's made it into large installations?

Sun Apr 24 17:42:50 PDT 2011

On 2011/04/24 15:44, Steve Acheson wrote:
> yeah, and iTerm on OSX does it too.  The problem is that those of us
> multi-button mouse X11 weaned users understand efficiency in the UI.
> Select in one app, move the mouse, paste.   I constantly forget that FF
> doesn't do copy-on-select and end up pasting something else in my target
> window.

I was astounded when I first plugged a 3-button mouse into my Mac, and it just 
worked.  (xterm)  That made it possible for me to live there -- and OS X was a 
huge improvement over dual-booting OS 9 and LinuxPPC.  But you wouldn't know the 
3-button mouse thing if you walked into an Apple store, so Apple gets only 
partial credit for this.

Even on Win7, I find that Putty can be told to behave this way (xterm 
selection), and one can save that back as the default.  And I absentmindedly ran 
"tail -f" on some Windows server or other (IIRC Server 2003) and _that_ just 
worked!  So some of the good ideas do get recycled eventually, if under the 
official radar.

I got over focus-follows-mouse on Mac OS X during Public Beta -- though this 
thread did remind me of the mental struggle involved; the OP has a point about 
that.  And drag-and-drop really is harder, in physiological terms, than click, 
move, click (for the same accuracy).  It's only "too hard" for those who know a 
better way[1].  But both are still way easier than trying to get XFree86 to work 
at all.

What I still miss are two GUI inventions from exmh, that I call z-axis nesting 
and spatial refile (coupled with the folder cache).  Both relied on a 3-button 
mouse, but could probably be done with 2.  The Outlook-look that every mail 
client now parrots wastes an entire third of the ever-bigger screen with a 2d 
view of a folder hierarchy, totally unnecessarily if you've seen how exmh 
represented this.  Perhaps I'll patent them, just to call attention to them 
again. :-)

[1] P.S. Buy my t-shirt: http://www.cafepress.com/jxh