Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by rbanffy on Saturday April 03, 2021 @04:07AM
(#26679171)
> I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2...
Apple’s terminal is one of the very few that passes the VT torture test and has support for double width and height attributes. Sadly, it doesn’t do overlines and doesn’t italicise my terminal font.
Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by vetinari on Saturday April 03, 2021 @04:37AM
(#26679300)
And it still cannot display powerline characters correctly.
Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by rbanffy on Saturday April 03, 2021 @04:55AM
(#26679390)
I think it depends on a font supporting them correctly. I’m using a zsh prompt that uses them and it seems normal. Check https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font and let me know if it helps. I was thinking of adding the powerline symbols to the test renderings.
Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by vetinari on Saturday April 03, 2021 @05:58AM
(#26679683)
The problem is not with font glyphs, but with colors. Background and foreground colors that should be the same aren't, they are different shades, thus some themes (such as powelevel9k/powerlevek10k) appear broken, see https://imgur.com/a/HAcE4Yu
And the line height -- it could be font, it could be terminal, I didn't investigate (it is DejaVu Sans Mono for Powerline).
Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by rbanffy on Saturday April 03, 2021 @07:47AM
(#26680241)
Terminal allows fine tuning the spacing. I tried to optimise my font to look good on the default settings, but that doesn’t always work and never works for every program.
Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by yen223 on Saturday April 03, 2021 @08:00AM
(#26680333)
> most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.
I haven't found a Linux terminal that is as good as iTerm, in terms of features. Any recommendations?
Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by lhl on Saturday April 03, 2021 @11:10AM
(#26681650)
I tried a bunch of terminals and ended up switching from urxvt to termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite a few years back (mainly for it's better handling for refreshing certain curses style output).
This might be the best recent overview of some of the pros and cons between some of the different options: https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/
For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous) [1].
Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.
Package manager is better on Linux for system packages, applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems). However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of problems).
In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can break down quickly once you want something more custom. With Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15 years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's nothing you can do.
[1]: https://www.hammerspoon.org/