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A surprising number of features exist in OSX to make it comfortable for people used to Unix-like OSes. It's a shame Apple is so poorly behaved, I'd think about buying a personal mac if it weren't for that.

Their terminal app will simulate a selection buffer for you (although it doesn't integrate with other apps which is why I end up pasting garbage into my terminal almost every time I clone something from github) and can optionally simulate pointer style focus like many X11 window managers do.

Every text widget in Cocoa seems to use Emacs-style GNU readline shortcuts. Something I didn't notice until recently.

Xquartz isn't dead, and interestingly Xlib has outlasted quickdraw and carbon, their own drawing APIs.



quickdraw and carbon were explicitly presented as legacy APIs when OSX was introduced and were supported for backwards compatibility reasons.

Quartz on the other hand, the actual supported API, has over time outclassed Xlib in almost every conceivable way.


Quartz does outclass Xlib in every way except portability and the shear number of language bindings.


There are clearly a couple of people who really care about this internally and push to let it keep these features. I hope that the day when they are drowned out by the rest of the company does not come…




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