recent posts related to the mac os x operating system
As a quick note, I often have a problem where the Messages app on MacOS (formerly Mac OS X) won’t update to receive new messages. By this I mean that I receive messages on my iPhone, but then when I go to my Mac and open the Messages app, my new text messages either never get there, or it takes a long time for them to show up in the Messages app.
As a quick note, this is a list of the IntelliJ IDEA keystrokes I use on my MacOS systems:
I just learned that MacOS has a softwareupdate command, and further learned that it has a --ignore option, which may or may not let you ignore useless updates. For example, my Mac prompts me daily to update Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, which I rarely (rarely!) use, so I don’t want to bother updating them. I’m hoping the a softwareupdate command will help me with this.
As a quick note, I haven’t tried to log into one of my GoDaddy websites in several months, and when I tried to log in just now I got this macOS ssh error message:
Unable to negotiate with <ip-address here> port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-dss
I don’t have much time to explain this today, but ... if you want to see how to use the sed command on a Mac OS X (macOS) system to search for newline characters in the input pattern and replace them with something else in the replacement pattern, this example might point you in the right direction.
As a “note to self,” I wrote two more Textmate commands yesterday, one to capitalize each word in a selection of words, and another to convert a CSV list of words to a simple list. Here’s the source code for the Capitalize command:
#!/bin/sh perl -ne 'print ucfirst $_'
The $_ portion of that Perl command isn’t required, but I include it as a reminder to myself about how Textmate commands and snippets work.
Here’s the source code for my Textmate command that uses the Unix tr command to convert a CSV list of words (such as a paragraph of comma-separated words) into a simple list of words:
#!/bin/sh tr , "\n"
As you can see, those commands are fairly simple. If you know Unix/Linux and then know a little about how to write Textmate commands, you can usually get it to do what you want. I like that you can use any Mac/Unix programming language or tool to solve the problem at hand.
I don’t remember where I first found this line of code, but if you put it in your Mac OS X ~/.bash_profile file, it’s an easy way to set your Mac Java version:
export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.8`
I can confirm this works with the Bash shell on Mac OS X 10.10. When I run the java -version command after opening a new Mac Terminal window, the output is 1.8.0_25.
A slightly more difficult way to set your Mac Java version is to look under the /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines directory to see which versions are installed, and then manually set the version.
I’m currently generating my new book on “functional programming in Scala” as a PDF using a combination of Pandoc and LaTeX, and as a result it feels like I’m opening the same PDF file about 100 times a day.
When using iTerm2, if you’re editing a file with vim and want to jump to a specific location in the file using a mouse click, just hold down the [Option] key when you do a normal left mouse click. That will take you to the location directly under the mouse cursor. (Unless the mouse cursor is beyond the end of the line. In that case the text cursor will be moved to the end of that line.)
I mention vim here because I just learned about this when using vim, but you should be able to use this with any app when using iTerm2. This is an iTerm2 feature (not a vim feature).
