Duplicating some UNIX behaviors

[DaiKirai]

The Mini and OS X are great so far, but there's a couple of *NIX features I'm really missing, and things that don't work as I expected. I wondered if it's possible to duplicate these somewhere in System Preferences or using third-party software.

1: The alternate clipboard. Selecting text copies it automatically; middle-clicking pastes it. Distinct from the clipboard operated on by control/command-C and V. It's somewhat clumsier then normal copying, but very convenient, and you still have the other clipboard available when you don't want to accidently obliterate its contents by selecting something.

2: On other OSes, the 'home' and 'end' keys usually operate on the line containing the cursor. In Mac OS X they instead affect the field with a scrollbar (Colloquy, Terminal) or do nothing at all (Shiira, while typing this post.)

3: While using 'less' in a terminal, page up and page down don't scroll the document. This makes it painfully slow to work through a document, if I don't have a keyword I can search for.

Know any solutions? Thanks in advance for your assistance.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

1. Try some third party apps on Max OS X Software (from your Apple menu) or Versiontracker...

2 & 3. Try the arrows, when I use less, I can scroll up/down with arrow up/down on my iBook... cmd-arrow left/right moves the cursor to start/end of line, and cmd-arrow up/down moves the cursor to the start/end of the text when replying in Firefox...

Enjoy Mac OS X, it really is a *nix flavour... just wait 'til you get the taste of it...

 

[jeremy.king]

3: While using 'less' in a terminal, page up and page down don't scroll the document. This makes it painfully slow to work through a document, if I don't have a keyword I can search for.

control+f = forward a page
control+b = back a page

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Do you know there's even a couple of tools to get multiple desktops?

 

[daveL]

In case you don't know, there's also the Darwin "ports" and Fink projects that bring the full spectrum of open source to OS X. Ports and Fink have very similar functionality, but "ports" is native to the larger Darwin project.

 

[DaiKirai]

control+f = forward a page
control+b = back a page

OK, but it doesn't make much sense. The Page Up and Page Down keys are there, and they work in other OSes... why not OS X? I'm guessing it's something to do with terminal capabilities, which I don't know enough about to fix on my own.

Command+arrow keys I think I can get used to, and I can't argue with the way Mac OS X uses Home and End differently.

Thanks, Mitthrawnuruodo, but Exposé and the Dock do everything I used virtual desktops for, and better

daveL, I'm using Gentoo/OSX... it was rather tricky coaxing GTK+ into compiling, and somehow I ended up with a Gimp build that lacks JPEG file support, but I like the do-it-yourself feeling and being able to main ties with the Gentoo community.

 

[DaiKirai]

Command+arrow keys doesn't seem to work in Terminal.

 

[jeremy.king]

OK, but it doesn't make much sense.

ctrl+f and ctrl+b are the original keystrokes for navigating pages, and to my knowledge, work in any *nix OS - that is with less, more, and vi commands.

You could probably map page up and page down using the stty command.

 

[yellow]

IN any flavor of UNIX (and UNIX-like OSs), I've never used anything other then spacebar to scroll forward a page and b to scroll back within more or less..

 

[daveL]

OK, but it doesn't make much sense. The Page Up and Page Down keys are there, and they work in other OSes... why not OS X? I'm guessing it's something to do with terminal capabilities, which I don't know enough about to fix on my own.

Page Up and Page Down in terminal moves you back and forth in your scroll back buffer, that's why that don't work as you expect in "less" or whatever. As said above, crtl-b and crtl-f are the standard (vi) page back, page forward keys sequences.

I hadn't known about Gentoo/OSX. There are aspects of 'emerge' that I like, although the 'USE' variable is getting to be more than cumbersome, to me.

 

[bankshot]

Page Up and Page Down in terminal moves you back and forth in your scroll back buffer, that's why that don't work as you expect in "less" or whatever.

By default, Terminal is setup to use Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown to send PageUp and PageDown keys to the terminal session. I prefer the xterm convention, which has Shift-PageUp/Down scrolling the window and unmodified keys sent to the session. It's easy to do: go to Terminal menu, Window Settings. Go to the Keyboard screen and edit the definitions for page down, page up, shift page down, and shift page up. I just added or removed the shift modifier to swap their functions.

 

[daveL]

By default, Terminal is setup to use Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown to send PageUp and PageDown keys to the terminal session. I prefer the xterm convention, which has Shift-PageUp/Down scrolling the window and unmodified keys sent to the session. It's easy to do: go to Terminal menu, Window Settings. Go to the Keyboard screen and edit the definitions for page down, page up, shift page down, and shift page up. I just added or removed the shift modifier to swap their functions.

I wasn't complaining; I don't have a problem with the default behavior. Thanks for the tip, though.