December 01, 2005 8:06 PM

The most annoying behavior of Mac OS X Tiger

After the first week working with Mac OS X, I found two very annoying features of the default setup. Both are connected with terminal application.

Imagine you do have Terminal in the Dock and do not have any terminal running so far. To run one, you just click on the icon in the Dock. It will open. OK. To open the second one, you can't click on it again. My anticipation was that if I click twice on the icon, two terminals open. Of course you can press Command-N to get new window open, but it is inconsistent - the behavior of click on the icon depends on the system status (it works if there is no black triangle below the icon thus no Terminal application is running, and it doesn't work if it already is running).

What is the second annoyance? Imagine you'd like to open several terminals at once with e.g. five Command-N. My resolution is 1680x1050 so there is plenty of space to place new terminals. But the default placement is to place new terminal over the previous one. So if you want to use them simultaneously, the first thing you have to do is to "distribute" them over your desktop.

Also I had to check "Use option key as meta key" to get the useful xterm's Alt+BackSpace behavior back (delete whole word backwards).

BTW - the default "max user processes" equal to 100 is also not good idea ;-) -----

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: Mac OS X