os x switching thoughts

Here's a brief list of thoughts and experiences I've had while switching from Windows to OS X.

Unix is great :). The Terminal.app is pretty nice too.

Try use a virtual desktop such as the one from CodeTek. Rather than just having one 17" screen on my new PowerBook, I've now got 8! :)

You can add hosts and change user defaults, such as your default unix shell via the excellent NetInfo Manager. (In Applications -> Utilities). e.g. I switched to using bash by default. Then I initialized MAVEN_HOME, ANT_HOME and JAVA_HOME in a .profile.

Mac.Mail is pretty good; to import from other mail programs like MS Outlook Express you could use Mozilla as Mac.Mail will import any mbox compliant mail.

While I really like the Terminal.app that comes with OS X, you might also want to try the open source iTerm which rocks. Like lovely xterms but nicer; try the semi-transparent background and use the mouse selections to copy text. Neat. Nice tabs too for lots of command shells.

To be able to use X windows applications like xemacs, xchat, gaim, xgalaga :) and various other goodies, remember to install both the X11 download from Apple, and the X11 SDK. 2 downloads! I missed this when I first installed the main X11 download which meant that fink couldn't find all the necessary X malarkey and so installing X applications wouldn't quite work.

If you need a file sharing client then LimeWire seems a reasonable gnutella client for OS X.

One problem with the current OS X version is that when you bind to an FTP server (by going to ftp://somehost.com in a web browser) it tries to mount the file system as a folder. This is great, however its only read only! Which is a real shame. Until they fix this some FTP UI client can be very useful. You could try Transit which I've used and found to be fine. Though right now I'm using axyftp, the X windows FTP tool which is a bit neater and more powerful (though doesn't look quite as sexy as a native Aqua app :)