Category: Mac OS X

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Essential Mac OS X tools: NoSleep extension

macosx-nosleep-extension – The MacOS X kernel extension, preventing sleep when you close the lid. – Google Project Hosting.

Very useful, especially when watching a movie on a projector using HDMI directly, instead of using AirPlay with an Apple TV. Thanks to NoSleep, you can close your MBA’s/MBP’s lid but still stream the movie to the projector.

If I were Apple, I’d be a bit embarrassed that such a setting is not already built-in.

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macvim – Vim for the Mac

When using Mac OS X, I used to use the CLI vim by the excellent Homebrew package manager.

Now I’ve just stumbled over macvim, which is kind of a “deluxe vim” for Mac OS X, including adjusted key bindings for the Mac and a GUI menu, supporting Cocoa file dialogs, among others.

It’s highly recommended if you want to have the best of both the CLI and GUI editor worlds.

Download

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Using IRC on the go

Running the console IRC client weechat (not to confuse with the wechat messenger) in a screen or tmux session on a Linux (or Mac OS X) server and accessing it trough mosh is a great way to use IRC on the go, i.e. with a unsteady Internet connection.

P.S. Thanks to Devaux and rmeyer for the hints

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Mac OS X: Reduce/increase workspace switching delay

Does dragging windows to the adjacent workspace in Mac OS X feel sluggish? Try lowering the according delay, e.g. to 0.1 seconds. For a persistent change, enter the following in a terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-edge-delay -float 0.1; killall Dock

If you’d like to have a longer delay, try setting a value of 1.0 or even 2.0.

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System information on Mac OS X

Mac OS X comes with a pretty useful tool to list all the details about your system:

# system_profiler

E.g. to find out whether your RAM supports ECC:

# system_profiler|grep ECC
          ECC: Disabled

Or wether your SSD supports TRIM:

# system_profiler|grep TRIM
          TRIM Support: Yes
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Some helpful Git resources

A friend recently told the following joke:

“The idea that git can be used offline is an illusion – you still need connectivity for googling which arguments to pass to what command.”

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but as always, there’s a grain of truth in it. So here we go:

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Delete duplicate e-mail messages

If you need to delete duplicate e-mail messages on an IMAP server, take a look at this useful IMAP de-duplicator script:

IMAP de-duplicator – IMAPdedup

As IMAPdedup is a command line interface tool (a python script), it’s particularly useful for:

  • automated deletion of duplicates (as it can be called from other scripts)
  • extraordinarily big mailboxes or if you have many subfolders (as there’s no intervention by the user required)
  • if you have console/shell access to the IMAP server (as you can then run the script on the server itself, speeding the de-duplication process further up)

I also found that it deals relatively well with failures (e.g. when a folder is read-only and hence messages can’t be deleted): It simply reports them on the screen and carries on.

Here’s a quick’n’dirty bash script to de-dup the inbox and all subfolders of the specified account:

#!/bin/sh
# Delete all duplicate messages in all folders of said account.
# Note that we connect through SSL (-x) to the default port.

SERVER="my.server.com"
USER="mylogin"
PASS="mypass"

for folder in `imapdedup.py -s $SERVER -x -u $USER -w $PASS -l`;
do
 imapdedup.py -s $SERVER -x -u $USER -w $PASS $folder
done

If you only have to de-duplicate messages in a small folder, you could also use the following de-duplication add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird:

Remove Duplicate Messages Add-on for Thunderbird

Note however that the ‘Remove Duplicate Messages’ add-on is intended for interactive use only, not for batch processing. I also noticed that it fails at cleaning big mail folders (e.g. containing 50’000 messages).