Mac OS X El Capitan Startup Transients
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 15:46:56 GMT
If you have a Mac, and lots of lispers do, you probably know that yesterday Apple released Mac OS X El Capitan, version 10.11. I'm usually more eager than is healthy to jump on new releases. Not so eager that I feel I have to get the developer releases, or even the public betas, but when a golden master comes out the door, for my Mac or my iPhone, I want it.
But I know to be at least a little cautious. So I followed MacWorld's advice about How to Make a Bootable OS X 10.0 El Capitan Installer Drive, and re-partitioned one of my mostly-empty external drives into three, the existing stuff, a partition to install El Capitan, and a tiny 10 gigabyte partition for the installer itself.
cd /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources
sudo ./createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/installer \
--applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app
I tried to set the new install partition as my startup drive in System Preferences, but it wasn't a choice. So I shut down, restarted, and held down the <option> key. It WAS one of the choices there. My external drive is a slow USB-2 drive, so I didn't expect lighting, but it said it would take 8 minutes. Yow! Well, that 8 minutes was actually 15, the last 7 of which at it saying "About a second left". Then it took another 24 minutes, pretty accurately predicted, to finish the install.
I moved Emacs, XCode, CCL, and Erlang, from my 10.10 drive to 10.11 and downloaded Karabiner from the web (so that I could use the <fn> key on my Apple bluetooth keyboard as <control>). I ran XCode, so it would do its initialization stuff. Emacs & Erlang just worked. CCL started, and recompiled its lisp code, but failed at rebuilding its kernel. Something about a missing include file. I reinstalled the command-line tools, and it worked.
xcode-select --install
At this point I'd had enough. I could have tried other things, but I decided to install on my main system. That took just a few minutes to complete the setup, then an hour and a quarter after the reboot to do the upgrade, estimated at 31 minutes, which rose quickly to 37 and fell slowly. I really wish Apple's installer gave a little more feedback about what it's doing. It sometimes seems to be stuck. WIth the old installer, you could open a progress window and see somewhat frightening messages, but at least some progress.
The new system came up. I had to re-enter some passwords for Mail, and I had to reinstall the command-line tools, but nearly everything I use works: Emacs, CCL, Erlang (and rebuilding Erlang with kerl), Mailplane, Firefox, VMWare Fusion (6.0.6), X11 & Gnumeric, Skype, Ignite (midi keyboard player), Adium (client for IRC, Jabber, and just about every other known chat system), Letterspace (notes app that syncs with iPhone), Nimbus (client for IRCCloud.com) and of Course Apple's own Messages, Safari, Contacts, and Calendars.
A couple of things that didn't work were MenuMeters, an updated version of which is available here, and Audio Hijack Pro, which I haven't yet tried to fix.
Also Mail now organizes conversations by actual conversations, not just by matching subject lines. I depended on the former behavior for my Fail2Ban notifications on a web site I adminster. It let me easily tell if a particular IP was causing enough problems to ban it permanently instead of just Fail2Ban's ten minutes at a time. I requested the old behavior as a preference here.
So what's new? Nothing much that I've noticed so far. Maybe it's a little snappier.
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One nice new El Capitan feature
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 02 Oct 2015 09:28:27 GMT
After reading this MacWorld article, I've discovered a new El Capitan feature that I think I'm going to be using regularly: split view. You can easily tell it to put an application on each side of your screen, e.g. the Firefox window in which I'm typing this and the Emacs window in which I'm composing my next blog post.
To make it work, click and hold on the green circle in the top-left corner of the window you want to be on the left-hand side of the split view. When you let go, that window will be expanded to fill half the screen, and your other windows will appear reduced on the right-hand side of the window. Click one of them to choose it for the right-hand side.
This creates a new Space containing the split view. You can switch to other spaces either with command-tab or a three-finger swipe left or right.
To see your menu bar, move the mouse to the top of the screen. Drag a window right or left to swap the two windows. Click on a green circle to remove a window from the split view. That leaves the other one covering the whole screen on the space. Click on its green circle to remove it from the space and remove the space. I don't know how to add a different window to a split-view space containing only one window.
Click on the image below for a 1280x720 version.
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Mission Control & Split View
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 09 Oct 2015 11:23:09 GMT
Thanks to Rainer Joswig, I now know how to switch one of the apps in a split view. Use Mission Control. Drag to the blank space at the top of the screen to create a new split-view space, drag another app there to make two. Remove one of them by clicking its green circle, then drag another over the now-lonely app.
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