Rob Allen's DevNotes

Following some discussions with friends who've recently started using OS X, I thought I'd note down some tips and tricks that I've learnt since I moved to Mac. This is in no particular order as it's taken from IRC logs of conversations I've had :)

Basics

• There's one menu bar for all application
• Closing the last window doesn't exit the application. Use cmd+q or the Quit menu item on the "application name" menu.
• System Preferences is available via the Apple () menu.
• Finder is the name of the file manager.
• Preview is the name of the PDF and image viewer. It's more powerful than it looks.
• Turn on View->Show Path Bar in Finder.
• Browsing Mac 101 if you're new to Mac can be helpful.

Backup

Get a cheap USB external hard drive and use Time Machine. There are no excuses.

PHP

Apple supply PHP 5.3.x with OS X 10.6 so you may as well use it. I wrote it up here: http://akrabat.com/phposx. Another alternative is ZendServer CE which is also regularly updated.

HFS+

HFS+ is OS X's filesystem and is case preserving, and is not case sensitive. Be aware of this at all times, or create an "HFS+ (case-sensitive)" partition using Disk Utility.

Keyboard shortcuts

• The cmd (command) key has the symbol ⌘ is used where Windows/Linux use the control key.
• Option is another word for the alt key and has the ⌥ symbol
• On the UK keyboard layout, the hash (#) character is found via option+3.
• Cmd+tab switches applications; Cmd+` (backtick) switches windows within an application.
• Shift+Cmd+[ and Shift+Cmd+] usually switch tabs within a window.
• Moving the caret:
  • left/right: move caret one character
  • alt+left/alt+right: move caret one word
  • cmd+left/cmd+right: move caret to start/end of the line
  • cmd+up/cmd+down: move caret to start/end of the document
  • The ↖ and ↘ arrows move the screen to the top and bottom of the document, but do not move the caret!
• Cmd+g is find next
• Cmd+r to refresh a web page as F5 doesn't work in Safari
• Finder shortcuts:
  • The return key renames a file, not opens it!
  • cmd+down to open the selected file
  • cmd+up to go up a directory
  • shift+cmd+g to go to any specific directory. Useful to get to /usr/local/. Also works in any open/save dialog within an application.
• You can create (or edit) your own keyboard shortcuts for any application's menu item using System Preferences.

Screenshots

Terminal

This is the command line application for OS X. Underneath, you have BSD, so it's works properly! Most common cli apps that you expect to be here are, such as, ls, du, df, curl, svn, etc. For anything else, use Homebrew.

• "open ." will open a finder window in the current directory
• Open Terminal Here is a useful script for Finder. Store in ~/bin and drag it onto your Finder toolbar.
• My article on changing the Terminal's colours is useful.
• Cmd+t for tabs in a Terminal window.
• Cmd+k to clear the buffer.

Applications

• TextWrangler - it's a good free text editor that handles editing files owned by root really elegantly. Install the command line tools and then you can do edit /etc/php.ini.
• MacVim.
• Adium for IM.
• Hibari or Twitterrific for Twitter.
• Cyberduck for FTP. Though spending the $34 for Transmit is worth the cash if you do a lot of FTP.
• NetNewsWire for RSS - integrates with Google Reader.
• Colloquy for IRC.
• MacFUSE to mount SSH and other 3rd parth files systems into OS X's native file handling. See also ExpanDrive also
• Handbrake for converting DVDs and other video converting requirements.
• OnmiDiskSweeper for a pretty version of "du".
• Omni Graffle (not cheap!) is a very good diagramming tool.
• If you tend to keep lots of small files with text notes in them, then look at Notational Velocity.
• VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop if you need Windows/Linux VMs.
• MarsEdit to write blog posts.
• Acorn for image editing if you don't need or want Photoshop.
• TinyGrab for screenshot sharing.
• Xcode for gcc, make, and other dev tools. This also includes File Merge and the cli tool opendiff, for viewing diff/patch files.
• MercuryMover for keyboard control of window positioning/sizing.

That's all that comes to mind. Feel free to add more in the comments and if I come across anything else, I'll update this article :)

I recently discovered that iTerm has bookmarks so you can set up a bookmark to ssh into a server and change the colours of the window. This makes it easy to remember which terminal window is for which server.

Thinking about it, I wondered if you could change the colours of the standard OS X Terminal via AppleScript. Inpired by Red Sweater's Random Color Terminal post, I wrote some code to automatically change the Terminal colour whenever I ssh into a known server.

As I know PHP and PHP is installed on OS X, I used that :)

The key to controlling AppleScript via PHP is the osascript command line application. The code I need specifically is:

system("osascript -e 'tell application \"Terminal\"
            set targetWindow to window 1
            set background color of targetWindow to {" . $bgColour . "}
            set cursor color of targetWindow to {" . $fgColour . "}
            set normal text color of targetWindow to {" . $fgColour . "}
            set bold text color of targetWindow to {" . $fgColour . "}
        end tell' ");

where $bgColour and $fgColour are comma separated strings containing three numbers between 0 and 65535 as AppleScript colours are 16 bit.

We start by getting a command line solution where we can type:
termcolour.php white
or
termcolour.php 00ff00
or
termcolour.php 255 0 0

and have the background colour of the Terminal change to the colour we have asked for.

TerminalColour class

Firstly we need a class that can change the colour of the Terminal window for us and also translate colours from 8bit RGB to 16bit RGB. As it is also useful to be able to specify colours by name, eg. "white", we'll add a lookup system too. I store this in /usr/local/bin.

This class is quite long, so this is a snippet:

<?php
class TerminalColour
{
    protected $_colour = array('255','255','255');
    
    /**
     * List of colours
     */
    protected $_colours = array(
        'white' => 'ffffff',
        'black' => '000000',
        // etc
    );
    

    /**
     * Set the colour of the topmost Terminal window using AppleScript
     *
     * $bgColour may be either an array of red, green, blue (8 bit) or a 
     * hex string or a string that matches an entry in the _colours lookup 
     * list.
     *
     * If $fgColour is null, then automatically use either black or
     * white based on brightness of $bgColour.
     *
     * @param array|string $bgColour
     * @param array|string $fgColour
     * @return array
     */
    function setTerminalColour($bgColour=null, $fgColour=null) 
    {
        if(!is_null($bgColour)) {
            $this->setColour($bgColour);
        }
        $bgColour = $this->getColour();
        
        
        // convert from 8 bit colour numbers to 16 bit ones
        $bgColour = $this->convertTo16bit($bgColour);
            
        if($fgColour === null) {
            $fgColour = $this->getFgColour($bgColour);
        } else {
        }
        
        $bgColour = implode(',', $bgColour);
        $fgColour = implode(',', $fgColour);
    
        system("osascript -e 'tell application \"Terminal\"
            set targetWindow to window 1
            set background color of targetWindow to {" . $bgColour . "}
            set cursor color of targetWindow to {" . $fgColour . "}
            set normal text color of targetWindow to {" . $fgColour . "}
            set bold text color of targetWindow to {" . $fgColour . "}
        end tell' ");
    }
}

As you can see, there's a variety of helper methods that I've not show here. setColour() is the where we map from the types of input that the user will provide to an array. Other that that, it's fairly self-explanatory.

Change colour from the command line

Now we need a script that uses our class. termcolours.php, that I can execute from the command line to change any given Terminal window to a new background colour.

termcolour.php is stored in /usr/local/bin and has execute permissions set using chmod a+x termcolour.php from the command line:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
include dirname(__FILE__) . '/TerminalColour.php';

process($argc, $argv);
exit;

function process($argc, $argv)
{
    if($argc == 1) {
        echo <<<EOT
TerminalColour: Set the background colour of a Terminal.app window 
USAGE: 
    1. termcolour.php {r} {g} {b} 
        ({r}, {g}, {b} are between 0 and 255)
    2. termcolour.php {hexvalue}
        ({hexvalue} assumed to be from 000 to fff or 00000 to ffffff)

EOT;
        exit;
    }
    
    $tc = new TerminalColour();
    if($argc == 4) {
        // called with three arguments - treat as rgb values (0-255)
        array_shift($argv); // remove name of script
        $tc->setTerminalColour($argv);
    }
    
    if($argc == 2) {
        // called with one argument - either a lookup or a hex value
        $tc->setTerminalColour($argv[1]);
    }
}

Again, not complicated. we check number of arguments to the script and if there are none, we display a help message. If there are exactly 1 or 3, then we call TerminalColour::setTerminalColour() appropriately.

Hooking into SSH

Lastly we hook into ssh and change the colour based on the server name.

To do this, I've used a simple shell script and modified termcolours.php to add some additional colour look up entries.

/usr/local/bin/sshcolours.sh:
/usr/local/bin/termcolour.php $@
/usr/bin/ssh $@
/usr/local/bin/termcolour.php white

termcolour.php

//...
    
    $tc = new TerminalColour();

    // add colours for servers
    $colourLookup = $tc->getLookupColours();
    $serverColours = array(
        'server1' => $colourLookup['darkblue'],
        'server2' => $colourLookup['red'],
        'server3' => 'C4DFC3',
    );
    $tc->addToLookupColours($serverColours);

    if($argc == 4) {
//...

(not a large change!)

finally, we add an alias to ~/.bash_profile:

alias s=sshcolours.sh

That's it! I can now type:

	s server1

and Terminal's background colour turns blue and I'm ssh'd into server 1.

Sometimes I just type termcolour.php darkred to remind myself that this terminal window is doing something long-running and not to accidentally close it...

This is a zip file of the relevant files.

In the vein of some of Lorna's articles, this is more a note for myself than anything else. Not everything is explained in detail as it assumes you know how to use a command line...

These are the steps I take to get the Apple supplied PHP working with GD, PDO_MySQL and Xdebug working on OS X 10.5.

/usr/local

Ensure that the following directories exist:

    sudo mkdir /usr/local/include
    sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin
    sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib
    sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/man/man1

Run Apache in 32 bit mode

This saves us having to compile our own MySQL as MySQL doesn't offer a "fat" binary

1. cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
2. sudo vim org.apache.httpd.plist
3. Immediately after the line containing <array> add:

       <string>arch</string>
       <string>-i386</string>
   

4. Reboot

MySQL

1. Download the 32bit version of MySQL 5.0.x for OS X 10.5 from mysql.com and install the pkg, the startup item and the pref pane.
2. Add /usr/local/mysql/bin to the path: vim ~/.bash_profile and add:

       export PATH=~/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH
       export EDITOR=vim
   

   at top of file. (Note that we set EDITOR whilst we are here so that svn is happy!)

3. Set up MySQL root password:

       mysqladmin -u root password {new-password}
       mysqladmin -u root -p{new-password} -h localhost password {new-password}
       mysqladmin -u root -p reload
   

   Quit Terminal to flush the history to file. Restart Terminal and remove the history file: rm .bash_history so that {new-password} isn't in plain text on the disk.

4. Set the correct socket information for PHP. Ensure MySQL is running via the System Preferences panel then:

       sudo mkdir /var/mysql
       sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
   

Rest of Apache setup

1. cd /etc/apache2
2. sudo vim httpd.conf
3. Find #LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so and remove the leading #
4. Find AllowOverride None within the <Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">section and change toAllowOverride All so that .htaccess files will work.
5. Restart Apache: sudo apachectl restart
6. Open Finder and navigate to /Library/WebServer/Documents/
7. Create a new folder called "orig" and place all files currently in the Documents folder into it.
8. Create a new file called info.php with <?php phpinfo(); inside it.
9. Use Safari to navigate to http://localhost/info.php and check that the PHP version is displayed (5.2.6 at the time of writing).

php.ini

1. cd /etc
2. sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini
3. sudo chmod ug+w php.ini
4. sudo chgrp admin php.ini
5. vim php.ini (assuming your user is a member of the admin group) and change settings appropriately. Change:

       error_reporting  =  E_ALL | E_STRICT
       extension_dir = "/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613"
   

   You must set the extension dir correctly. (Commenting the line out also works...)

PHP extensions

The supplied PHP doesn't come with pdo_mysql, pear or gd, so fix it.

1. Download the correct version of PHP from http://www.php.net/releases/. (5.2.6 at time of writing)
2. Create a directory called src in your home directory and unpack the PHP source. This creates /Users/rob/src/php-5.2.6/ in my case.

pdo_mysql

1. cd ~/src/php-5.2.6/ext/pdo_mysql.
2. phpize
3. MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 \
   CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386' \
   LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386' \
   CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386' \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql
4. make
5. sudo make install
6. Edit /etc/php.ini and find the extension_dir line and add after it:

       extension=mysql.so

7. Restart apache: sudo apachectl restart and check in the phpinfo that pdo_mysql is now loaded.

GD

Installing GD onto the stock PHP install that is supplied with OS X is slightly more complicated than you'd expect because you need to install libjpeg first.

Libjpeg

Libjpeg is available from the Independent JPEG Group.

1. Download the source code: http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
2. extract to ~/src
3. cd ~/src/jpeg-6b
4. cp /usr/share/libtool/config.* .
5. ./configure --enable-shared
6. sudo make install
7. Libjpeg is now installed in /usr/local/lib

GD extension

1. cd ~/src/php-5.2.6/ext/gd
2. phpize
3. MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 \
   CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386' \
   LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386' \
   CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386' \
   ./configure --with-zlib-dir=/usr --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-png-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6
4. make
5. sudo make install
6. Edit /etc/php.ini and find the extension_dir line and add after it:

       extension=gd.so

7. Restart apache: sudo apachectl restart and check in the phpinfo that GD is now loaded.

PEAR

1. cd ~/src/.
2. curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear > go-pear.php
3. Accept defaults, except for installation prefix (1) should be /usr/local
4. Check that the include_path in /etc/php.ini is correct and includes the PEAR directory (/usr/local/PEAR).

Xdebug

Can't have a PHP development environment without xdebug!

1. sudo pecl install xdebug
2. Edit /etc/php.ini and add

       zend_extension="/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/xdebug.so"

   after the other extension lines.

3. Restart apache: sudo apachectl restart and check in the phpinfo that xdebug is now loaded.

PHPUnit

1. sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
2. sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

It all works on this machines, anyway :)

Updatesee Marc Liyanage's PHP5 packages

To uninstall MySQL and completely remove it (including all databases) from your Mac do the following:

• Use mysqldump to backup your databases to text files!
• Stop the database server
• sudo rm /usr/local/mysql
• sudo rm -rf /usr/local/mysql*
• sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
• sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/My*
• edit /etc/hostconfig and remove the line MYSQLCOM=-YES-
• rm -rf ~/Library/PreferencePanes/My*
• sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/mysql*
• sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MySQL*
• sudo rm -rf /private/var/db/receipts/*mysql*

The last three lines are particularly important as otherwise, you can't install an older version of MySQL even though you think that you've completely deleted the newer version!

As I mentioned a while ago, I'm now using a MacBook Pro. All is going well, and I like Mail.app's search and data detectors very much. There are some niggles though that I miss from Thunderbird. My top 3 are:

* GPG integration (Thunderbird's Enigmail)
* Mail.app's insistence on attached PDFs and images inline
* Filing mails to arbitrary folders using the keyboard (Thunderbird's nostalgy)

It turns out that there are solutions to all three issues for OS X's Mail.app:

* GPGMail from Sente. (Not for Leopard, yet though)
* Mail Attachments Iconizer from Lokiware
* MsgFiler from tow.

I had found GPGMail a while ago and I"m looking forward to the Leopard release. In the meantime, I am getting by using the Services->GPG menu. I only learnt about the other two by accident.

Lokiware is sponsoring the Daring Fireball RSS feed this week and John Gruber's write up about this event, pointed at Dan Frakes’s Macworld article which not only persuaded me to download Mail Attachments Iconizer also mentioned MsgFiler too.

I've bought both! Clearly sponsoring DF's RSS feed is worthwhile :)

Now, I'm trying to decide if I should buy Yojimbo...