So I took down my external monitor.

About three months ago I hooked up my 27″ monitor, a bluetooth keyboard, some book-shelf speakers and was pretty happy… until I wasn’t… today.

The monitor is showing some signs of ghosting, and everyone once in a while it flickers. I really didn’t want the Apple Magic Keyboard (external) because of the janky arrow keys, so I bought what I thought was the best BT keyboard I could find. It takes 2.5 seconds to re-connect, it often “fights” with whatever signal my Magic Mouse was using, jets out some random characters, and finally connects. It doesn’t have touch-id so I have been manually typing my super-hard password everyday! I mis-type it about half the time. I had to use the bookshelf speakers remote control to switch it to Bluetooth before my computer would connect to it, so I also bought a dock and wired it, but I still had to turn them on….

I think you get the point. It just never works out for me when I try to do this… An external monitor is nice, but the setup always comes with some price I have to pay.

My MacBook Air has a screen and a keyboard ATTACHED to it, and it works…all the time!

So, I took all that shit down and am just back on my 💻

…again.

It always feels weird going from this big-ass screen to this tiny 13″ one. My desk always feels a bit empty and barren too…it’s always nice to have your desk full of big tech 💪🏻! But, it just isn’t meant to be.

I missed ⌨️👈🏻 Touch ID so much.

I have been searching the Internet for the answer to this, and it turned out to be quite simple.

You don’t need Karabiner-Elements, just run:

defaults write com.apple.loginwindow DisableScreenLockImmediate -bool yes

That disabled the stupid Lock key above the Delete key! I hit this thing all the time, and I have a really complicated password!

First off, I have never liked using Google Chrome for development. The only reason I DEV in it is because it’s a popular browser. That’s it…

Recently I have had a bit of a paradigm shift in how I manage windows and tabs on my Mac. I use spaces now. I am preferring windows over tabs (but not spaces over tabs, that’s evil, and wrong)…

All this to say that one little annoyance, related to this, has me switching back to Firefox DE (Developer Edition) for my development browser.

You remember when I said I preferred windows over tabs? Well, let’s say I have a Chrome window on Space A doing Work X… and I have one on Space B doing Work Y…and I need to open a link on Space C to do Work Z… Well, if I click that link I get a new tab on random Space X, Y, or Z (probably the last window I used).

That’s not what I want. I’ve tried every hack to make sure a new link opens a new window on Space C (my current space) in Chrome, but, like Google does, there just isn’t a reasonable way.

To my surprise, Firefox DE (and Firefox itself) on MacOS follows the behavior I have setup on Mac.

This setting should dictate everything. Most apps follow the rules here, not Google Chrome. But, like I said, FFDE seems to like to follow the rules I set on my own computer.

So what I want is for external links to just go to my clipboard! Then I can decide what to do with the URL. But, with Choosy and Shareful I can do so much more. I can copy the URL to my clipboard (just like I wanted) and I can also send that URL to other apps like Messages, Mail, Notes, and more!

Checkout the video on this post on how I did it. You will need to install Choosy and Shareful to accomplish it.

Note, I updated my Rule in Choosy to this (which is a bit different than the video):

Ever since macOS added dark mode I have been a user. Using dark mode in the OS, my text editor (Sublime), Github, etc.

But today I tinkered around with what using light mode might look like for me:

As you can see I would have to compromise a little with Sublime and iTerm, I just can’t find a good enough color scheme that is all-white or off-white, so I went with a theme I’ve used in the past and enjoyed.

I’ve always felt a bit of nostalgia using light themes, so I often wonder if I’d ever use one. But for now back to dark mode…