Hello Christian, Travis has already replied to you about searching the archives for posts on using terminal. I'll give you a direct link to one of his archived posts that gives a pretty complete explanation of how to configure terminal, since it dates from before this list started using the Mail-Archive web site with its easier search interface. • Tips on using terminal (October 13, 2010) http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/2010/004769.html
There are a few other small tips for someone working between the GUI interface of the Mac and terminal. First, there is a free app in the Mac App store named "Go2Shell": https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/go2shell/id445770608?mt=12 Go2Shell opens a terminal window to the current directory in Finder. It supports shells other than bash, and iterm, iterm2, and xterm windows in addition to terminal. You can configure it using the command (from terminal): open -a Go2Shell --args config Then set up your preferences in the window. Another useful tip is that you can use command-c from the Finder GUI to copy the location of a file or folder and paste it in with command-v as an argument to a command in terminal. The full path to that file is always copied that way. For man pages, you can use a free app named "bwana" that works through Safari, or you can use shell commands to display them in terminal. Mac-access list posts are searchable in the public Mail Archive link that appears at the bottom of each email post: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Just type the app name "bwana" (without quotes) into the text box on this web page and press "return" to get a list of results. Activate the first link (with VO-Space in Safari, or by pressing your right and left arrow keys if QuickNav is turned on; or by double tapping on the trackpad if you're using trackpad navigation instead of a keyboard). This should be Travis' post: • Re: Man page entries sent to TextEdit or Preview [was Re: Terminal Query] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01731.html If you're reading the archive pages on a Mac, use the access key combination Control+p to read the previous post in the thread, which is my post giving ways to set up a variant "pman" or "tman" command in my .profile to send the results of the "man" command to Preview or TextEdit when I work in terminal. The Mail Archive page supports wild cards, regular expressions, and Boolean arguments in the search terms, and searching by author, date range, or subject. I rarely need to use all these features, since just typing in a few search terms gives good results. I may filter the search by author, e.g., by adding "from: Travis" (no quotes needed unless the I'm using both first and last name, space after the colon is optional, and words are case insensitive). If I want to get only the first posts in threads, I'll add "-Re" to exclude replies, and if I want the results listed by date, instead of relevancy, I'll add "sort:newest" or "sort:oldest" to my search terms. For more details, read the Mail Archive FAQ at: http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html Useful topics include search syntax, and support of keyboard shortcuts. The ability to use access key shortcuts to read up and down threads is one of my favorite features, and this works on multiple browser/operating system combinations. In Safari, use Control-n and Control-p to navigate to the next or previous post in a thread. In Internet Explorer on Windows, use Alt-n and Alt-p. In Firefox on linux or Windows, use Alt-Shift-n and and Alt-Shift-p. (On a Mac, I think the Firefox access key prefix is Control.) So you just need to use the appropriate access key for your browser and platform. There are a couple of useful web pages for people coming to the Mac from linux or unix. Here's one: • Five must-known commands for Mac OS X Terminal by Dave Taylor (April 25, 2012 at the O'Reilly Answers pages): http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/3324-five-must-known-commands-for-mac-os-x-terminal/ The usefulness of some of these features was not apparent to me when I first started using the Mac, but the "open" option is used in the options I used to send man page output to terminal or preview, as mentioned above. The "textutil" command to convert file formats on the command line was used to answer Sarah's question about a way to batch convert her .rtf files to .txt files. You can find more about this in the archives. There's a really old O'Reilly web page dating in 2002 on the "Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks": http://macdevcenter.com/lpt/a/2792 It's still good for a quick summary info, but the default shell has long since changed from tcsh to bash, and the way startup is handled is completely different. For Mac users coming from a Linux or Unix background, there are the older O'Reilly books like "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks (Leopard), 4th Edition" by Ernest E. Rothman, Brian Jepson, and Rich Rosen: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596520632.do That's available through Bookshare for international members, and is probably the latest of the "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks" books that Jepson wrote. The recent titles seem to assume that if people are switching to the Mac from Unix or Linux now, they need background about learning unix. One such eBook on this subject from O'Reilly: • Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion by Dave Taylor (Released: September 2012) This has the subtitle: "Using Unix and Linux Tools at the Command Line" and the URL for the web page is: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025870.do It is also available for purchase from iBooks for $9.99: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/learning-unix-for-os-x-mountain/id563659679?mt=11 A really good series for learning the Mac are the "Take Control" eBooks. They're written as good introductions to the topic, but they also contain material for experienced users. One of the perks of your list membership is the ability to purchase these books at substantial discount (80%), and to access them from a locally maintained server. I was having difficulty getting through to this web page when I first composed this post, but it seems to be working now: • Mac Access Dot Net; Accessible Take Control Catalogue http://www.mac-access.net/Take-Control.html "Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal" eBook is a good source. Here's the link to the web page description at the Take Control Books site: http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/command-line Finally, I'll just note that it is possible to embed shell scripts inside Automator workflows and AppleScripts. There's basically a "Do shellscript" action that you can select in Automator, and then paste in your shell script. That's another way you can combine actions you'd normally execute through terminal scripts within the GUI. HTH. Cheers, Esther On 10 Apr 2013, at 07:46, Harmony Neil wrote: > Agree. I only changed stuff with the cursor so it didn't keep skipping > things so much. > On 10 Apr 2013, at 18:12, Travis Siegel wrote: > >> I have posted multiple times about settings for terminal to maximize the >> experience for vo users. However, in general, terminal works just fine with >> vo. It's a bit lacking when it comes to compiling programs, as it has a >> tendency to skip loads and loads of text, but otherwise, it works very well, >> even via ssh. The only major show stopper when it comes to vo and terminal >> is the fact that you can't go down/up lines and remain where you are in the >> current screen column. This makes it very difficult to tell where compiler >> errors may be located, as the little ^ symbol most command-line compilers >> use cannot be located easily simply by going up a line, since vo likes to >> return to the start/end of line depending on which way you're going. What >> specific problems are you having with vo under terminal, and what have you >> done to attempt to solve the issues. >> You'll need to search the list archives to find my posts on configuring vo >> for best use under terminal, but for the most part, the default settings are >> enough to get you most of what you need under terminal. >> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. 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