On 12 Nov 2008, at 23:51, David Morel wrote:
> Because this is the way most Unices do. Mac OS X is not most unixen. Mac OS X was designed under the expectation that the typical user would be operating from the GUI exclusively, so given that consideration what exactly does a command like pwd mean? Apple's decision is to treat pwd as the directory from which an application is launched. This is the default behavior but can be changed by application developers to reflect more complicated needs for their applications. > And setting env variables in the preferences isn't half as flexible > as with a shell startup script, which I (and others) are pretty > used to editing, pre- or appending stuff to the $PATH and other > variables thanks to shell expansion. How exactly is editing prefs not as easy as editing config files? Are you operating under the misapprehension that prefs can only be edited in the GUI? If so, see man defaults (does the right thing automatically) or man plutil (need to understand plist format and know what options exist). Apple did provide a perfectly acceptable method of passing environment vars into apps in the form of ~/.MacOSX/ environment.plist see <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/ MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/EnvironmentVars.html> and <http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html> > Not executing a shell by default is a design decision from Apple, > but wrt the way Unices behave, and what people expect generally, it > might not be the brightest they had. Or did I miss something? You are making assumptions about the user base for whom Apple designed Mac OS X, and it was not the typical unix/linux user. Mac OS X used designed for Macintosh users, so yes, you did miss something. The typical Mac user neither understands nor cares about the unix end of things and doesn't need to, but the functionality is there for those of us who do care about such things and all we need do is edit a hidden file which is exactly what we are used to doing on more standard unix/linux distributions. So it's really not all that different from edit .*rc or other config files except that the file is a plist formatted file rather than plain text. I hope this helps clarify and enlighten us all. Dave -- "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -- C. A. R. "Tony" Hoare --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_mac" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
