Focus follows mouse
Although I understand the confusing user interface issues caused by focus
follows mouse behavior in a system that uses a command bar attached
to the top of the screen instead of the window, I still would like to
use focus follows mouse in some cases. For example, one of my virtual
desktops contains all of my X11 programs, where focus follows mouse is
very natural. To activate focus follows mouse for X11 apps,
type in a terminal:
defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true
To go back, type:
defaults write com.apple.x11 delete wm_ffm
You can also get this behavior with the standard Apple Terminal using:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
Better xterm
The default xterm started from Apple's X11 is very basic. One way to add
functionality is by setting default command line options. For example, to add a
scrollbar, go to X11 -> Applications -> Customize... and replace the command
for the terminal with
xterm -sb
A (perhaps better) way to modify your xterm behavior is through the
.Xdefaults file. For example,
to get a scrollbar (and increase the history length) whenever you start
an xterm, put the following in ~/.Xdefaults
xterm*scrollBar: true
xterm*saveLines: 1000
Then run
xrdb ~/.Xdefaults
For more .Xdefaults settings (colors, font size, window width, etc.) type 'man xterm'.
Run X11 apps from Terminal
If you want to run X11 apps from the Apple Terminal, you need to make
sure X11 is running and your
DISPLAY environment variable is correctly set. If you are
running csh or tcsh, you can add this to your .cshrc file:
if (! $?DISPLAY) then
setenv DISPLAY :0.0
endif
Save Safari tabs
I like Apple's Safari browser a lot, but one feature it's lacking is
an ability to save the current set of open tabs for the next time you
open the browser. Check out this
hint on macosxhints.com for a set of applescripts that accomplish
the task.
UPDATE:
I recently discovered Saft,
an amazing plugin for Safari that gives you many many missing features,
including automatically saving the open set of tabs, so I no longer need
the above scripts. Saft is great and well worth the shareware fee.
