I did it. I bought a 12in aluminum Powerbook. I’m in shock a bit. Especially the part where I went to the credit union and got the check from Smith&Barney changed into a stack of hundred dollar bills, and the gittery drive from the credit union to the Apple store. I figured the fact that they dropped the price of the computer $300 when I walked in the door was a good omen. And it is beautiful shiny, and new. Especially after my Vaio which had the battered, scarred look of a veteran.

Now what? I used to be a Mac user but that was a different me, and a different time. When last I had a Mac I was just starting to become a real coder, editting Perl cgi in BBedit, and FTP’ing it to the remote FreeBSD server to run it. Times have changed, but I haven’t really updated my knowledge of “Mac as development tool”. (brief visits to home have kept me up-to-date on “Mac as game platform” and “Mac as Photoshop running machine”)

Package Manager?

Is Fink still the package manager to go with? Do you find yourself installing packages from Fink, or downloading individually packaged versions of software, or building from source primarily? Whats with Fink only having a Mysql 3.x? Is that typical? How screwed am I going to be if I start futzing with Apache’s guts but Apple seems to think they are qualified to upgrade my Apache? ### Text Editor?

My dirty little secret is that even on Linux I don’t use emacs, or vi, or jed. I can, sure, but when I working locally I used Nedit. Fits the way I think, doesn’t argue with me as much as any of the classic editors do, excellent syntax hilighting, a good plugin system for hooking in things like Ctags (okay I never quite got my ctag support working the way I wanted). So now I use a Mac, is my only option BBedit? I remember being very frustrated with BBedit last time I used it. (though for years after I left the Mac I missed it) In particularily its got the kitchen sink like emacs, and a GUI for it! So cluttered. But the worst problem was their choice to use a closed scheme for syntax hilighting grammars so that the selection of languages available is painfully limited. What are people using? (update: some excellent advice below, including how to get Nedit working on OS X. But I really am curious what else people are using, this is a chance to do something new, and potentially find something better. )

Terminal

Ack, Terminal.app is so bad. I hadn’t ever realized that it had no history between invocations. Suggestions here? I remember something called iTerm which people liked for a while, had tabbed terminals, anyone using it? ### X and a Window Manager

Now that OS X 10.2 has X built in is there an advantage to installing an alternately packaged X like XDarwin? Or a window manager like OroborosX? (looking around I do see X anywhere on my laptop, is it not included by default?) ### Virtual Workspaces

Is Space.app still the best simulation of workspaces/virtual desktops we’ve got?