Computer Soulmates

I met my computer soulmate the other day.

It started with a technical issue on my work laptop, as many things do. A number of health checks were failing on my soon-to-be-retired machine following a mandatory OS update, and I couldn’t put fixing things off any longer - so I scheduled a remote tech support session like any pandemic-imposed WFH dev.

Actually, I’d more or less managed to figure out the OS update issue before the meeting started, but hadn’t had the time to follow through.

Just in case something did go wrong though, I didn’t want to miss out on the support.
And I’m really glad I didn’t.

Dark Mode

It’s barely worth bringing up, but it was how the conversation got started. I had an enterprise software running, and it looked slightly different from the usual, default look; it was in dark mode.

Yeah, there’s that joke about devs using dark mode. But then I excitedly moved my cursor to a hot corner to show them my desktop background - a solid wall of pure #000.

If there was a straight man present, or a cocky narrator, they probably would have said, ”Are you an idiot?”

Spaces

Hot on the heels of the riveting black desktop, the topic turned to the use of Spaces, a.k.a the virtual desktop feature of macs.

Since a restart was imminent, they noticed that I was swiping between spaces furiously as I checked to make sure that all of my work was saved.

“Do you also fullscreen your frequently used apps and swipe between those together with your spaces?”

Why yes. Yes, I do.

Magnet

Resizing windows manually is for plebs and we use Magnet instead.

Actually, looking at the price of Magnet now, I probably would’ve chosen to be a pleb too, if I hadn’t gotten it for like a dollar back in the day. It’s basically the whole reason why I can’t toss my Apple account, and I told them as much as they were looking through my System Preferences because of the insistent red badge with the 1 on it.

I only ever logged on to my personal Apple account on my work machine because I had to install Magnet on there for free. I just had to.

Flycut

This one’s all them, I had no idea about clipboard managers before this conversation.

With Flycut, you can make multiple Cmd + c’ s, then instead of Cmd + v to paste, Cmd + Shift + v instead. And then you can cycle through your clipboard history to pick what you want to paste, using arrow keys.

Do you know what this means?

This means you can copy both a URL and a form value, go to your browser in another space, and then - wait for it - paste the URL in the address bar, then directly paste the form value on the page once it loads!

Without swiping back to the previous space to copy the form value separately!

You don’t understand how groundbreaking this technology is. The future is now!

…actually, I still haven’t gotten super used to doing this yet. As it turns out, I don’t often need more than 1 item in my clipboard history.

But apparently it’s indispensable when you’re a tech support worker and handle upwards of 10 customers with the exact same issue everyday and have to send them the same goshdarned information everytime.

SSH Config

While we’re at it, I guess I’ll also mention SSH configs, although it wasn’t brought up in that scintillating conversation with my computer soulmate.

We work with a lot of VMs on the job, and “with everything moving to cloud these days” I doubt that’s going to even begin to stop anytime soon.

And yet I still see a lot of people going to their notepads, or stars forbid the cloud platform itself - to click, highlight, right-click, and copy the IP address.

All right, I exaggerate, sometimes they use Cmd + c instead. But still!

All of those oft-used IP addresses could just be handily saved in your ~/.ssh/config file with an easily remembered name. Then you could just type ssh easily-remembered-vm-name and Bob’s your uncle.

Hell, if you have your shell set up right (worth a whole ‘nother post) with autocomplete, you can probably just type ssh eas followed by Shift, or something.

I start typing VM commands even before the SSH connection’s through - since the keys get queued anyway, as long as you typed your password correctly, you can shave maybe a whole half second off whatever you’re doing.

What? I’m not crazy, you’re crazy.

Scroll Direction

At this point we’re venturing dangerously into unrelated ranting territory, but.

Reverse scroll direction is the way to go for trackpads, right? I mean, it makes sense just to map your trackpad direction to the direction you want your viewport to move.

I know, I know - natural scroll has its logic too, treating the screen like a physical piece of paper you push away from in order to change what the static viewport is showing. But I maintain that that only makes sense in the context of touchscreens - like you know, on your smartphone.

My computer soulmate agrees, anyway.

Conclusion

At the risk of sounding incredibly snooty, we have no idea how other people get by without these handy tools. I for one would surely turn into a tightly wound frustration ball.

And it’s not like I’m that much of a power user - I haven’t even gotten around to making real use of reverse-i-search, for crying out loud.

There’s surely a world of productivity-enhancing workflows out there just waiting to be discovered, if only I’d put in the investment.