~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

As with any dotfile repo, I wouldn't recommend installing the entire thing at once. Instead, try and take the time to read through it and select settings that you want piecemeal. You'll end up knowing what everything does, especially in the case that something strange happens and you want to tweak things.<p>Edit: I should note that I learned this the hard way starting out, I went backwards by ripping out things that didn't work for me/did not like, but not until after making some horrible mistakes!

This isn't "sensible hacker defaults", it's more like "some guy's view of what Mac OS X should be like".

<p><pre><code> defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool false </code></pre> This is a terrible idea. If your browser, or anything else, is ever conned into downloading and opening a file, the quarantine is the difference between "what the fuck, why is an executable I've never launched before trying to launch?" and silently getting owned.

See also <a href="http://secrets.blacktree.com" rel="nofollow">http://secrets.blacktree.com</a> , a database of known hidden settings that can be changed. There is also a Preference Pane available there that makes it really easy to adjust them form System Preferences.

This:<p><pre><code> # Finder: allow text selection in Quick Look defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool true </code></pre> Combined with "Use OSX Finder Quicklook (Spacebar) to preview all plain text files"[1] is pretty useful.<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230594" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230594</a>

<p><pre><code> # Set language and text formats # Note: if you’re in the US, replace `EUR` with `USD`, `Centimeters` with # `Inches`, and `true` with `false`. </code></pre> :)

This is the most important one, that's not been mentioned in OP:<p><pre><code> defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool NO </code></pre> It disables the stupid "smooth scrolling". on Lion (and everything before that) you could disable it from the 'General' tab of SysPrefs, but now it's gone.<p>What does it do? When you press spacebar in a web browser, or fn-downarrow in a text editor, it "smoothly" bring new content up from the bottom of the screen and pushes current screen up.<p>I don't know, maybe it works great on recent machines, but my poor old 2009 MBP's graphics card is not really powerful, and this animation is not smooth at all. It distracts me a lot.<p>I <i>strongly</i> suggest you at least try it. If you don't like it, just replace NO with YES and everything's back to normal.

Is it really beneficial to disable disk image verification? What does OS X actually verify when it opens a disk image? It does take some time to verify disk images and I want to be sure of what I'm actually disabling.

Great list. Stripping animations out is always appreciated.<p>Does anyone know how to alter / remove the animation from horizontal motion between spaces? Particularly when using the keyboard shortcuts, this whizzing is disorienting and irritating.<p>I assume it is not possible, given that animation seems to be keenly bound to the trackpad 'peeking' operation and all.

Looks great. How about making home/end on external keyboards go to beginning/end of the line rather than the document?

That's a long list. I kind of want to run the whole thing just to see what happens...

You know, when I tell people I use Linux, they usually say something like, "But don't you have to spend countless hours on pointless yak-shaving tasks just to get things to work sensibly?"

`# Group windows by application in Mission Control`<p>`defaults write com.apple.dock "expose-group-by-app" -bool true`<p>Can't believe any hackers would use this. Mountain Lion was worth $20 just for the new `false` alone.

I don't think I'd like this at all. What's the point of disabling animations, system-wide resume, not letting the OS terminate inactive apps, etc?

It would be great to have a script that setup your machine with all settings, is there a list of all "defaults write" commands somewhere?

&#62; Sensible<p>HAHA! What?<p>How on Earth are these sensible<p>&#62; # Disable the warning before emptying the Trash<p>&#62; # Empty Trash securely by default<p>&#62; # Disable the “Are you sure you want to open this application?” dialog