The Quality Without A Name

Things to analyze for hacking MacOS X:

Pixie.app – defines a hotkey and scrapes the screen
Quartz Debug.app – messes with the brightness of windows belonging to other apps
FunkyOverlayWindow – defines a hotkey using Carbon

Let the record show that on a 2005 15″ Powerbook it is possible to distinguish the left and right Command and Shift keys.

“I don’t hand sharp knives to small children.” — PJ

“If you have sharper knives, you don’t need as many small children around!” — Rob

I need a MacOS X hack that makes Command-Tab select among all windows, not just among applications. That is, it should work like it Alt-Tab does in Windows and Metacity.

I know about Command-Tilde. I even know about Control-F4. Not what I’m after!

Often I run some command that’s going to take a long time to finish, like

  make solver

and when it’s done I want to run some other command, like

  ./solver < problem.1

but I only want to run that second command if the first command (the make in this example) succeeded. If I’d thought ahead, I could have run this in the first place:

  make solver && ./solver < problem.1

But I didn’t. So I have this handy bash alias:

  alias +='(exit $?) && '

Which gives me a similar effect. I run the first command (the make), and while it’s running I type in a plus followed by the second command:

  + ./solver < problem.1

If the first command finishes, the second command will run. Otherwise, the second command will be ignored.

Note that this only works if the first command doesn’t read from standard input.