How to Mac - part 2

Well, I'm still making use of a Mac. Four months in I'm starting to get used to the keyboard and some of the oddities (good and bad - I still hate the behaviour of this window management). Time to write some more docs for future-me should I ever have to configure one of these systems again.

Clipboard management

I made the switch to using a clipboard manager years ago and frankly now can't comprehend life without one. I found loads of them on the Mac - mostly expensive and part of much larger packages which I don't need.

The one I settled on is called Flycut. It will only work on text (and will occasionally foul up copying images with a keyboard shortcut) but it works really well for my simple use case and is easily installed via homebrew:

brew cask install Caskroom/cask/flycut

Services

Installing services such as Postgres or Elastic Search via homebrew often writes them into the startup sequence. Sadly, these days I am not coding enough to need these all the time and available RAM is precious so I went looking for an easy way to change what is run when. It seems an easy way to do this is homebrew services, which is easily installed via the homebrew interface and lets me edit the startup sequence and run the services directly without them starting next time I boot the machine. This last command requires a very recent version. Docs on the end of the link, above.

Bash and completion

I took a brief foray into Z shell and found it different enough to bash to irritate me. Given time I think I could configure it to be something I really like, but after some time and rage trying to configure the prompt I decided that I don't have the patience for that at the moment.

The motivator here was improving bash autocompletion - especially for git and homebrew. It turns out the version of bash shipped with OSX is ancient so the first stop was upgrading that via homebrew which then meant changing the bash-completion package (written for bash 3) over to bash-completion2 (which is for bash 4). Next I discovered that both git and homebrew ship with their own completion config which just needed to be parsed when the shell starts.

And thus the fun began.

Homebrew bash autocomplete configuration is hidden in /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d instead of the more usual /etc/bash_completion.d. I needed to encourage it to parse the contents of this directory instead - which proved surprisingly difficult. In the end I had to add this to ~/.bash_profile:

for bcfile in `brew --prefix`/etc/bash_completion.d/* ; do
  . $bcfile
done

(copied from this Stack Overflow answer because of lazy).

As far as I can tell, bash is supposed to read the contents of the bash_completion.d directory automatically but because homebrew moves it the paths need fixing. There is almost certainly a better way of doing this, but by this point I was bored of this problem and decided to accept something that worked. Then write about it.

I also found I needed to create an empty file at /usr/local/etc/bash_completion because this line was complaining:

[ -f /usr/local/etc/bash_completion ] && . /usr/local/etc/bash_completion

I probably could remove the line, but I had Fear of removing such a standard line of config and ending up breaking something else in the future. Again, probably not the best solution.

And that's it for the moment. Like last time this is mostly my own documentation so I can reproduce these steps in the future written here on the off-chance it is useful to someone else. I certainly don't recommend any of the bash config stuff as the best way of doing things. Think of these notes as a diary, recording my reluctant exploration of MacWorld. End disclaimers...