Essential Mac Software
November 11th, 2006 by admin
This is probably repeating a lot of content scattered throughout the site, but I figured I’d mention sort of super-useful programs that I use almost daily when working. All this software is Universal, I believe, so it runs natively on Intel and PPC Macs.
TextWrangler from the makers of BBEdit, an excellent free text editor which can even open files remotely over sftp or ftp and also integrates nicely with …
Fugu a great graphical front in for the built-in SFTP client.
(Transmit is an even better FTP/SFTP/etc program, but it is not free. Lots of Mac-like features though.)
Preview, which is part of OS X, has a handy feature in that it can crop PDFs (in the Tools menu) and you can also copy, say a Figure, from a PDF paper and then do a “New image from Clipboard.” The copying preserves the vector information in the PDF so it’s much better than using a screen capture.
Btw, the basic screen capture keyboard shortcuts. Shift-Command-3 to take the whole screen, Shift-Command-4 to select part of the screen. These will create PNG files on the desktop. Add the control key to either shortcut and it’ll send the screen capture to the clipboard.
Texshop is my favorite front end for tetex/latex. There are links at the Texshop page for installing TeTex but like for so many other thing I install tetex using …
Fink. Fink has ports of hundreds of unix programs that run in OS X, and a relatively easy way to install them and their dependencies using the included FinkCommander. Installing Fink the first time is usually a cinch… when Apple updates OS X to 10.5, however, upgrading Fink is always much more a headache than it should be. But I use Fink to install the enlightenment (my favorite window manager), zoinks (a graphical (gasp!) X11 text editor), and most importantly Fink is how I install …
grace, a fantastic 2D plot program which can produce PDF, EPS, JPG, GIF, and you name it output. The PDFs are vector-based and look fantastic, and it has an excellent WYSIWYG editor to control all the aspects of the plots. It’s a million times better than gnuplot. I still use IDL to create some of my plots on the fly, but for most – Grace is the way to go.
Just a few other programs I’ll mention briefly, Graphicconverter is the swiss army knife of Mac graphical software, and worth every penny. Synk 6 is a great backup utility, and has cool “zeroscan” functionality. Time Machine in Tiger may make it moot, but I do like Synk. I like to use Fire for instant messaging, though for some reason everyone uses Adium, which I still don’t understand.
.