See this thread titled :
Disk Not Ejected Properly – AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AND AGAIN…
I have started seeing this problem a LOT
TL;DR: Something breaks when macOS goes to sleep
Solution : Do not allow macOS to sleep when using external disk.
I have had to resort to using an application called Amphetamine (earlier Caffeine) and set the ‘Drive Alive’ mode to prevent sleep. All the problems went away. It has nothing to do with ‘frayed cables’ or ‘drives going bad’.
In my plan to shift to Linux, I considered dual booting.
Turns out I may not have enough disk space.
I have reached at about 12 15GB free space. At first I thought, if live session can fit into 4GB, then 12 15GB should be enough, but looks like that may not be the case. 1
So I’m shelving the plan to dual boot.
I’ll go with full disk install. That way linux gets entire 128GB SSD 👍
I have been using macOS for almost 9 years, and never used the workspaces
feature (Not sure when it was introduced)
But after looking at Omakub I started using this feature.
Essentially, I divided the apps as follows. (Or at least that is what I
wanted 😄) Each app (window) on its own workspace.
Alacritty
Firefox
Vivaldi
Whatsapp and Telegram (Social apps) together on separate workspace.
But somehow, some of the browser windows (I think new ones, after I moved
existing windows to different workspace) moved to different ones.
Suddenly, it started feeling “jumpy”
(I think) I eventually figured out how to ensure that all the firefox windows
remain in the same workspace 1
While looking at all these, I came across Amethyst (Still exploring, maybe
upcoming post) and also WhichSpace (finally app mentioned in the title of this
post 😆)
This is really tiny utility. It shows the desktop number (like 1, 2, 3, 4) that
is all.
But it is useful (at least I think so)
In the dock, right click on Firefox icon -> Options -> Assign to -> This
Desktop. The default is None hence the seemingly erratic behaviour. ↩︎
After going through omakub 1 and its source, I wanted to recreate it on macOS as much as possible.
The first thing was to use Alacritty.
I had tried it in the past, but moved to Wezterm.
The reason I stopped was because there was no support for panes or tabs (which is by design) But now that I’m anyway using Zellij for that, I decided to give Alacritty another chance.
I was aware of macports for quite some time (since I moved to macOS about 8 years ago) But most of the tools seem to be suggesting brew install, so I didn’t give macports a second thought.
8 years later, my MBP is old, and soon will not be supported by Apple and brew
While I upgraded to macOS monterey, this is going to be last version supported on this hardware.
As I intended and mentioned here - I have started upgrade to macOS Monterey. I had already taken backup. (I don’t expect the entire data to be lost, but still ..) Just before I clicked the upgrade button - I created a list of software I need to re-install after the upgrade. I also went ahead and deleted apps left-right and center from the Applications folder. Nice (and not so nice) stroll down the memory lane.
The tips from my previous post didn’t quite work while writing the blog post using helix editor.
But as much as I can guess, it is a feature of the terminal and not the editor itself. So no point searching “Accent marks in Helix” 😄
Turns out initially1 wezterm didn’t support accent mark without special configuration. ('use_ime = true'), but since then it is enabled by default.
Yet, it didn’t work for me.
In my previous post I needed to type letter é but didn’t know how. (So I just copied it from the browser page that search result returned, explaining how to type accent marks on macOS 🧠)
But later, I searched and got it working.
We use what is called as Dead Key method. In Keyboard viewer, pressing the ALT (or Option) key, shows the dead keys.
So to type é, I press ALT+e, this produces the accent, then (after releasing ALT) I press e.