Splefty
splef-ty \'splef-te̅ \ adj: nifty, novel, cool or clever.
computers/macosx/panther
Wed, 06 Apr 2005

Case-Insensitive Tab Completion in bash (default OS X shell)

I’ve been wanting case-insensitive tab completion from the shell for about 2.2 years. Ignore all the stuff in the man page about “nocase-glob”, which I guess affects how globs like Honig* operate. Instead, you want to do this:

  1. create file .inputrc
  2. set completion-ignore-case On
  3. save file

Kill your terminal window and open a new one. From now on, when you hit tab, filenames will expand in a case-insensitive manner. (Since HFS is case-insensitive anyway, this makes a lot more sense.)

[/computers/macosx/panther]

Fri, 07 Nov 2003

Removing OS X 10.3’s metal look

Apple’s use of the “brushed metal” interface first introduced with iTunes has expanded in Mac OS X 10.3 to include the venerable Finder. Plenty of people think brushed metal is ugly and should be used in moderation, and I’m one of them.

Today I found a combination of tools that allow one to banish brushed metal from everything except iTunes. (For some reason, I don’t mind it in iTunes, presumably because it’s always been that way.)

WhiteOut is an installer package that replaces the “metal” resource file with a pinstriped aqua version. (Don’t dig too deeply on that site if you are easily offended.) Whiteout’s scheme doesn’t look quite the same as the native aqua appearance but it looks pretty good with it.

However, if you combine Whiteout with the Metallifizer, you are really in business. All Cocoa apps (iChat, Safari, iCal, etc.) get native Aqua look under the Metallifizer. The Finder gets a unique but matching white-with-pinstripes appearance from Whiteout, and iTunes remains unchanged because it uses some kind of weird hack to get the metallic texture in the first place. I think 10.3 looks pretty good with these modifications.

[/computers/macosx/panther]