[rek]

Hey all .. yesterday I bought a TiBook 667/DVI after a lot of lurking (my first Mac in 7 years, after using WinNT/2k in recent times). Loving OSX and the whole Mac thing, but there a few little tweaks that I had gotten used to in Windows 2000, which I would really like to find equivalents for in OSX.

I've had a look around and found heaps of little utilities (that give OS8-like application menus, apple menus and window shading), but I haven't found any of:

1. a way to change the name shortening in Finder views so that the ellipsis (...) shortens the END of the filename, and not the middle bit. (little rant: who at Apple thought that was a good idea!?!)

2. a "Command Prompt Here" context menu when you control-click (right-click) on a Finder folder. i.e. you select that option from the context menu, and a new Terminal window pops up with the selected folder as the current directory. Saves a lot of time changing directories for that quick unix command!

3. a way to open a new Terminal window and have a particular script auto-run. Sort of like how on a Solaris unix machine you can type "xterm -c ./mycoolscript.sh" -- (that will open up a new xterm window and run "mycoolscript.sh" automatically.)

Are there any tweak type utilities, or nifty Finder hacks (ResEdit type things, excuse the System 7 lingo, it's been a while ) to get anything like the above?

And while I have all your attention is is possible for these windowshade, application menu etc. type patches to conflict like INITs and control panels used to in "Classic" Mac OS? Or would they just seg-fault and explode if they had a problem with anything, and generally leave everything else alone.

[ 05-16-2002: Message edited by: rek ]

[MrBS]

Originally posted by rek:
<STRONG>2. a "Command Prompt Here" context menu when you control-click (right-click) on a Finder folder. i.e. you select that option from the context menu, and a new Terminal window pops up with the selected folder as the current directory. Saves a lot of time changing directories for that quick unix command!
</STRONG>

Not quite as good as what you want, but you can get there rather quickly by typing "cd " into the terminal and then dragging a folder on. hit return. That's your pwd.
~BS

[Diggory Laycock]

1 - no way I know of

2 - I think that there is an applescript that you can sling in the finder's toolbar which will open the terminal to that directory - Look on Apple's site for toolbar scripts.

3 - Have a dig round the "OS X Unix" forum - I'm sure the answer is there.

Unless they are kernel extensions these hacks won't be able to crash the machine (at worst the WindowServer crashes.)

[TheBarty]

I think 2 and/or 3 have a solution.

Try OpenTerminalHere OTH at VT

Regards

[philzilla]

direct link to the OpenTerminalHere page. while you're there, you may as well install mark's php & mysql packages

[V0ID]

If you have a finder window open, you can drag the little folder icon around that appears in the title bar. So you could use the tip mentioned earlier (type 'cd ' in the terminal and drag the little folder icon onto the term window).

[zerologic]

Originally posted by rek:
<STRONG>Hey all .. yesterday I bought a TiBook 667/DVI after a lot of lurking (my first Mac in 7 years, after using WinNT/2k in recent times). Loving OSX and the whole Mac thing, but there a few little tweaks that I had gotten used to in Windows 2000, which I would really like to find equivalents for in OSX.</STRONG>

Welcome back. This can only mean great things for Apple the Mac community.

<STRONG>1. a way to change the name shortening in Finder views so that the ellipsis (...) shortens the END of the filename, and not the middle bit. (little rant: who at Apple thought that was a good idea!?!)</STRONG>

Dunno, this one perplexes me as well. The best solution I've found is to simply make my columns wider Drag the tabs at the bottom of a column to make all wider and option-drag to make a single column wider.

<STRONG>2. a "Command Prompt Here" context menu when you control-click (right-click) on a Finder folder. i.e. you select that option from the context menu, and a new Terminal window pops up with the selected folder as the current directory. Saves a lot of time changing directories for that quick unix command!</STRONG>

OpenTerminalHere has been mentioned and is the best solution so far.

<STRONG>3. a way to open a new Terminal window and have a particular script auto-run. Sort of like how on a Solaris unix machine you can type "xterm -c ./mycoolscript.sh" -- (that will open up a new xterm window and run "mycoolscript.sh" automatically.)</STRONG>

OS X is unix! Of course you can... fire up terminal and type: pico .tcshrc

tcsh is the default shell so that will let you edit the shell's startup script. You can do whatever you want in there including fun aliases and startup scripts. See: man tcsh

<STRONG>Are there any tweak type utilities, or nifty Finder hacks (ResEdit type things, excuse the System 7 lingo, it's been a while ) to get anything like the above?</STRONG>

Look at TinkerTool and friends for this. There are plenty of hidden features that you have to know how to get to and TinkerTool lets you do it. As far as tweaking "resources" to do things, you really don't get such low level access to OS X. Resource forks are relatively ancient history in our world now.

<STRONG>And while I have all your attention is is possible for these windowshade, application menu etc. type patches to conflict like INITs and control panels used to in "Classic" Mac OS? Or would they just seg-fault and explode if they had a problem with anything, and generally leave everything else alone.</STRONG>

Check this out: all of those programs are just that... programs, not extensions!. If one decides to take a dump, you're set... OS X is unix and along with that is protected memory.

Thank your beloved deity that extensions on that level are DEAD. DEAD I say. There are kernel extensions but they load dynamically thus there is little to no reason to manage them.

[kangoo_boo]

1. a way to change the name shortening in Finder views so that the ellipsis (...) shortens the END of the filename, and not the middle bit. (little rant: who at Apple thought that was a good idea!?!)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dunno, this one perplexes me as well. The best solution I've found is to simply make my columns wider Drag the tabs at the bottom of a column to make all wider and option-drag to make a single column wider.

Because u usually will have files like:
lbalbalba(..)627
lbalbalba(..)628
on macos9 (macos9 doesn't use a lot file extension)
on macosx file extensions are more widely used so u may get like:
lbalbalba(..).jpg
lbalbalba(..).jpg
which is quite a problem because windows would have displayed
lbalbalba627....
lbalbalba628....

so there are the pros and cons and it even depend on the file name lenght and stuff (you can probably make a lbalbb(..)627.jpg fits in the window too)

OS X is unix! Of course you can... fire up terminal and type: pico .tcshrc

tcsh is the default shell so that will let you edit the shell's startup script. You can do whatever you want in there including fun aliases and startup scripts. See: man tcsh

Won't argue about osx not being *unix* (i rather say *nix but arg stop i'll make the topic go away ) since even sjobs says it is
so xterm -c ./blah.sh is not quite the same thing as having tcsh autoexec something when u launch it
so you can still install xterm (along with XFree86, yay) but it's not very hm confortable under osx
something else to add to the next Apple Terminal

[rek]

Thanks for all your help, guys! That dropping the folder into a terminal window thing is really cool (I usually have at least one terminal window open somewhere, so that should do the trick.)

The script thingy is quite perplexing; what it is that I want to do is spawn a new terminal window from an existing one, from inside a script. I might play around with AppleScript a bit to see where that can lead me.

[Brooks Seymore]

Originally posted by rek:
<STRONG>Thanks for all your help, guys! That dropping the folder into a terminal window thing is really cool (I usually have at least one terminal window open somewhere, so that should do the trick.)

The script thingy is quite perplexing; what it is that I want to do is spawn a new terminal window from an existing one, from inside a script. I might play around with AppleScript a bit to see where that can lead me.</STRONG>

Check out http://www.macosxhints.com/, there has been some discussion of this sort of thing within the past several weeks.

- Brooks

[Brass]

Here's something which goes part way to doing what you want. It's kind of cludgy, but sort of works...

Create a new file called "NewTerm.command" with the contents:

#!/bin/tcsh
/bin/tcsh

The ".command" extension, makes the file double-clickable, so that it will open and execute in a new terminal window.

Now, in an existing Terminal window, type:

% open NewTerm.command

The Darwin "open" command effectively sends a double-click to the file (or you can use a -a option to specify the application to open it in:

% open -a /Application/Utilities/Terminal.app NewTerm

(if you name the file NewTerm instead of NewTerm.command).

A new terminal window will open, run the script, and then exit. However, because the script itself runs a new shell, it is the new shell that gets exitted, and not the initial one.

[rek]

thanks Brass! I think that's *exactly* what I'm looking for.

[stupidFish23]

Because u usually will have files like:
lbalbalba(..)627
lbalbalba(..)628
on macos9 (macos9 doesn't use a lot file extension)
on macosx file extensions are more widely used so u may get like:
lbalbalba(..).jpg
lbalbalba(..).jpg
which is quite a problem because windows would have displayed
lbalbalba627....
lbalbalba628....

Uhm... try turning off file extension showing in the finder's prefs... or manually in files that just refuse to hide them, using the info panel...