As I keep working with the Mac for my wiki and blog, I experience more Apple features I’m starting to like. Here are some of them in no particular order.

Tweaking and productivity

One of my favorites is hot corners, and I’m glad to see it’s still around. I use the upper left corner to bring Mission Control, which places all the open apps side by side in thumbnails. This helps me find a buried terminal window or see which tab I have open in Safari with a quick glimpse.

Speaking of top-left, my dock now lives at the left side of the screen where it makes more sense to me. With a bit of a hack in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0; defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0;killall Dock (I forget what YouTube video I got this from), the dock shows up instantly without delay as soon as I hover over with the mouse. Otherwise, it’s hidden from view and out of the way.

Shortcuts is something new I’m learning to appreciate. On Linux, I have a couple of helpful bash scripts to automate things. I’m used to going into the terminal there if I want to run a command (or run it from within Emacs). Shortcuts is an interesting hybrid of scripting and GUI. It’s not programming more than it’s a fancy way of creating macros on a Mac or an iPhone. I appreciate how well-integrated it is. For example, a shortcut I created becomes a part of a system menu that shows on right-click.

Everything in one place

When I’m working on my Linux desktop, I use Brave to open various work web apps like Outlook, Teams, and ServiceNow. This usually gets the job done.

With the Mac, these apps go to the next level. Opening Outlook in a dedicated app means it integrates with Grammarly (which I use to check for typos) and the shortcut I mentioned above. I like having the main apps in their own dedicated windows.

Additional perks

A couple of additional things I learned to applicate on the Mac:

  • Music sounds better (I stream lossless classical music from IDAGIO) when I plug my headset directly. no need for a DAC.
  • Seamless integration with the iPhone for scanned documents, freeform for sketches, notes, and mode
  • Homebrew gives me tools I’m used to from Linux, like ffmpeg

What is not as good

I’m constantly aware that all nice Apple things go through Apple. Every sketch on Freeform, every scanned document, my txt files on the desktop, etc. Meanwhile, the Mac is not behind a VPN and Safari is logged into my old Google account. I don’t like this.

Of course, I could download and run Librewolf on the Mac, log out of Google, and turn off iCloud sync. Maybe I will. For now, it makes more sense to have these Mac features in place with the knowledge that when I want privacy and ownership of my stuff without a third party, I can go back to Linux.

One exception I’m making is my org files for Emacs. I sync them with my file server through Syncthing, so they are not stored in iCloud. Still, there’s a bit of an “off” feeling to it.

Speaking of Emacs, it’s definitely happier in Linux. I can get Emacs working nicely on the Mac, but it requires more tweaking and packages from Homebrew. Even Prot’s nice ef-themes don’t work quite as nicely on the Mac, and the colors are a bit off. Again, I know I can tweak and change that, but it goes to show that Emacs is meant to run on Linux, at least out of the box.

Overall

For now, I’m pretty happy - and surprised. As I explore more automatons and productivity hacks, I feel more at home. Still, Linux definitely has its place when it comes to my trust and privacy.