It's not arbitrary though. The point was to move away from the metaphor of moving the window around a document to just manipulating the document directly as you do in iOS. Granted it's not as obviously the right thing when touch is not involved, but it is the right thing.
The last time someone really thought about scroll direction was when they invented the scroll wheel. The implementors associated it with the motion of the position indicator in the scrollbar rather than the motion of the document. The reason this is wrong is because it's an unnecessary indirection from the document itself. At the time computers could not documents quickly enough to have any kind of physicality, so the scrollbar + indicator were critical UI elements simply for performance reasons (ie. the scrollbar is what could be drawn fast enough to enable responsive dragging, and the window wouldn't redraw til you let go). Once people got used to it, there was no reason to question it until the modernization of touch interfaces where suddenly the inconsistency became apparent.
While it may be wrong in theory, changing it meant that all muscle memory developed by users thus far was thrown out of whack.
What was the gain for disorienting the users by introducing a new default? An improvement in acceptance by users who had only used tablets and phones but never PC's? Is that a large set?
As far back as 10.3 on my iBook, I had the scroll direction reversed, with a utility that also enabled two finger scrolling on the trackpad.
The "standard" way of doing it never made sense to me, even with a mouse scroll wheel. I scrolled down and the page would go up--how did that ever makes sense?
I has messing around with it, and had another application reverse it for just the mouse, and then it got reset or something, and now I don't know which way is the correct way. I think there's a triple negative in the settings. I flipped it again, thinking it was backwards, but not it still feels backwards. Nothing is right anymore. I'll just set it to whatever windows has it, so it's the same when I boot into that.
I much prefer natural scrolling, but the 10.6 standard has the same thing going for it as vim: it works everywhere. I gave up trying to reverse the scrolling in Windows with AutoHotkey, it was a mess. :(
Well, yes - it is a superset of all the little tweaks that experienced and demanding users have found useful at one time or another. Clearly, you shouldn't be applying the whole file all at once before deciding what it is in there that you need or prefer.
Have a look at it - there really is some good stuff in there. This file, and then all the cool tweaks to the Cocoa text engine that you can make, make OS X a tough OS/environment to beat.
> Well, yes - it is a superset of all the little tweaks that experienced and demanding users have found useful at one time or another.
Eh, a lot of it is just some guy's arbitrary preferences, with little or nothing to do with "experienced or demanding users". Stuff like hiding the bookmarks bar in Safari or showing track notifications in the Dock is experience neutral.
Other than that, there's a few nice tweaks (like unhiding ~/Library), and the occasional disastrous idea (killing the executable quarantine).
Eh, a lot of it is just some guy's arbitrary preferences, with little or nothing to do with "experienced or demanding users". Stuff like hiding the bookmarks bar in Safari or showing track notifications in the Dock is experience neutral.
Completely agree - but someone has to keep this compendium somewhere, and why not keep it as a piece of working code, rather than as a web page or something? If you end up having to use a lot of different Macs and have to set up new accounts for yourself on a regular basis, what you'd probably do is fork the project here, eliminate the stuff you hate, and then that's your acceptable-mac-environment-maker script.
occasional disastrous idea (killing the executable quarantine).
Out of curiosity, why is this disastrous? I'm not a fan of the idea, but I can imagine how someone might come to hate com.apple.finder.quarantine badly enough to do this? Maybe this particular tweak should be commented out by default, though.
> Completely agree - but someone has to keep this compendium somewhere, and why not keep it as a piece of working code, rather than as a web page or something?
I think this would make sense if it was a compendium, but this is an arbitrary subset of everything you could possibly set via defaults, with no rhyme nor reason to what is and isn't in the list other than "this particular guy cares about these particular things".
> Out of curiosity, why is this disastrous? I'm not a fan of the idea, but I can imagine how someone might come to hate com.apple.finder.quarantine badly enough to do this?
I can imagine being annoyed at any number of things, but that doesn't mean turning them off is a good idea.
Security is all about layers, and disabling an important layer (and especially a layer you'll rarely trip over once you have all your commonly used apps downloaded) doesn't strike me as a bright idea. It only takes one bug in your browser of choice to con it into launching an arbitrary executable, or one asleep at the wheel moment to trick you into double-clicking a cleverly icon'd malicious app; the quarantine is your mitigation against such events.
Not when you confirm the dialog over and over to the point of being conditioned to it - when confirmation becomes an automatic response on the users part, it's no longer serving them.
fredsted's point is that it is not that. It's largely one person's personal preferences. I agree there's some good stuff in there, but there's also a lot I wouldn't like. I don't think it's a superset, just a set.
But how else would you describe a superset? I hate the glass dock and have hated it since 10.5 when it was introduced. You might like it and you'll stick with the default behaviour. For me it's a useful tweak. For you, you can live without it. It's not a superset of preferences - it's a superset of tweaks. Some of them you won't like, some of them are quite nice and this is a good place to find them all.
Or did you mean that you know of a whole bunch of other tweaks that should be on the list? If so, add them and send a pull-request.
There are many legal options one can change with the defaults command. Not all of them are present. Hence, it is not a superset of all configurations. Rather, it represents one person's preferences.
Thank you for sharing. Sorry you triggered an avalanche of whining from the "ugh. This free stuff isn't exactly how I'd do it if I weren't so lazy and I actually did something" brigade.
Could not agree more. I'm not completely convinced that "sensible defaults" for a hacker necessarily means disabling animations, etc. We're really past the point with machine power where this sort of thing is necessary, and I can't understand the continued insistence on doing things like that.
I really expected this list to relate to things like git settings, etc.
