691: A Menlo Phase

27:55Anyway, it's tricky, and the number of things that create a bunch of small files very quickly and change them rapidly and remove them when I'm done is increasing over time, not decreasing.

28:07John Siracusa:With regard to Time Machine on spinning disks, Ben Madison writes, I used a spinning disk for Time Machine until fairly recently. I was backing up a MacBook Pro, which I needed to unplug and take to meetings fairly regularly. If the backup happened to be running at the wrong moment, it took forever for the backup to end and the drive to eject, and I was frequently late to meetings as a result. I assume this was just the nature of Time Machine until I got an SSD and was thrilled to discover that I no longer needed to budget extra time for disconnecting my laptop. This is a reasonable complaint, but why wouldn't you just plug it in overnight or something rather than having it plugged in all the time?

28:38Yeah, you gotta remember to do it or do the thing where you tape it to the back of your laptop lid, right? You get a 2.5-inch spinning disk that's bus powered and you just tape it to your laptop. With portable stuff, it is tricky because Time Machine, even with SSDs, time machine takes its sweet time when you say cancel this backup you know you could just yank the machine and unmount it and you think oh it'll handle it it'll be fine but given how frequently time machine corrupts itself under ideal circumstances i wouldn't want to test that

29:03John Siracusa:then carlos perera writes when using time machine to backup my macbook air's 512 gig ssd to a two terabyte spinning disks backups were taking more than 12 hours and at some point something got corrupted and backups just vanished from the external drive backing up my macbook pros one terabyte SSD to a four terabyte external SSD takes 10 minutes with no issues. Additionally, David Fockema writes, since Mac OS 26 Tahoe, surprise, my Time Machine drive that's the same size as my source volume has failed to complete a backup twice in a single month. I now have a new drive that's twice the size of my source volume, and I have needed to reformat it and start a new Time Machine backup five or six times since last fall.

29:42John Siracusa:My current oldest backup is April 28th, and again, Time Machine is misbehaving. It's doing a backup right now, and progress is at 30 % with 250 gigs copied so far. I fear the result will be, again, that the entire backup drive fills up with all previous backups, except the last one from last Friday, will be removed to free up space, and still the new backup cannot be completed. Again, I will have to reformat the drive and start over. How can this even happen with a 2X drive? I don't know. I don't see a lot of people experiencing this exact issue, but it's driving me batty. I'm not sure what triggers it, and then updates.

30:11John Siracusa:I had to nuke my drive again and start over. No space left on device. I have not personally seen this, but I mean, that stinks. I've seen it. And the basic issue is that Apple's maintenance of Time Machine has been mediocre at best. It's the type of feature that when it was introduced, it was amazing. And it's not like they haven't updated it. If you look in the underpinnings, they've changed it a lot over the years to try to improve it. But it just has never really, like to give an example, visibility. i mean this is a complaint we have about a lot of apple stuff but like visibility into what is going on right and many people are you'll see online they're saying hey uh time machine backup completed i sat down on my computer i i wrote an email uh and then i noticed time machine had started again because an hour had passed i'd read it i'd spend an hour writing an email and browsing the web and then i see time machine started again and it's taking forever what happened on my mac in that last hour that's taking so long to back up it's from your perspective as a user it's like i sent one email and i browsed the web what what you know what how many files is it backing up what is it doing why is it taking so long that's the type of thing where more visibility into the system would be beneficial so you could see time machines taking a long time because it's backing up seven million new files in this particular directory you know like what is it doing why is it taking a long time what is it backing up maybe i should exclude that directors i don't care about those files maybe that's a cache directory that somehow a time machine isn't backing up and the second part is setting aside visibility is for simple tasks especially with ssds and so on shouldn't it be getting faster over time to do an incremental backup of the same amount of data shouldn't it be getting more reliable over time shouldn't it be you know shouldn't we be polishing this so that it is efficient faster better like and they have added you know more efficient things where it will use the apfs snapshots and tries to use the features of the file system to you know has different strategies for figuring out what has changed since the last time which is the tricky bit here like i'm not saying it hasn't improved but it hasn't improved enough it doesn't have any better visibility than it did before and these type of bugs where you're like i don't understand what's going on i have a time machine drive it's huge it it tells me there's not enough space it deletes everything else or gets stuck on a file and i don't know what file it's stuck on like you'll find so much stuff in web searches of like use lsof uh you know to figure out what files are open and figure out you see this with mdls with the spotlight the next thing as well just everyone trying to diagnose look at the logs look at these lines if this happens do this erase your disk and format it in this way do this thing it shouldn't be this fraught the whole point of time machine the promise of it is that it's for backup for people who don't know how to deal with backup so it's just simple plug in a drive you want to back up to it okay i'll take care of everything for you but instead it becomes this babysitting nightmare where again this is not on spinning disks this is not lots of small files this is just regular use of time machine and you know i would file this under another aspect of mac os that has been allowed to i don't know it's been allowed to deteriorate but it certainly hasn't improved you know you would think features that exist for many many years that are used frequently wouldn't just get the bare minimum of maintenance and slowly accumulate new bugs instead they would be you know knocking down every one of the bugs and getting better and better like i would want to see every few years at wwc say uh oh and the new version of macOS we made time machine better it backs up 20 faster and we did this and we did that and like they just don't say that anymore even the improvements they do make they don't tout and it's like frustrating to me because time machine is one of my favorite uh features of macOS ever added and watching it watching it not thrive is uh not fun we are sponsored this episode by zapier zapier

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35:47John Siracusa:uh emma roth at the verge writes apple has agreed to pay 250 million dollars to settle a class action lawsuit that accused it of misleading customers about the availability of its apple intelligence features the proposed settlement would apply to people in the u.s who purchased all models of the iphone 16 and iphone 15 pro between june 10th 2024 march 29th 2025 people who submit qualifying claims can receive 25 for each eligible device which may increase or decrease up to$95 per device, depending on claim volume and other factors, according to Clarkson Law Firm, the legal team behind the class action lawsuit.

36:20John Siracusa:Apple denied any wrongdoing. Here's Apple's full statement. Since the launch of Apple Intelligence, we have introduced dozens of features across many languages that are integrated across Apple's platforms, relevant to what users do every day, and built with privacy protections at every step. These include visual intelligence, live translation, writing tools, Genmoji, cleanup, and many, many more. Apple has reached a settlement to resolve claims related to the availability of two additional features. We resolve this matter to stay focused on what we do best, delivering the most innovative products and services to our users.

36:48I love the legal system where they can claim no wrongdoing, but it's like, but you didn't ship those things in the ad, right? Right.

36:54Marco Arment:We're going to claim no wrongdoing for this thing that was obviously the case, and also we're going to pay$250 million. Right. I mean, the no wrongdoing and paying, sometimes you do just make a lawsuit go away, but even in their own statement, they basically said, well, we did a bunch of other stuff, right? it's kind of vaguely related and we're resolving this thing with you know claims related to the availability of two additional features like yeah those are the ones you didn't ship that's what they're suing you about put ads on tv about those things and people would see the ads on tv and say i'm going to get a new iphone because it's going to have those things and you know you literally today they're not shipping they're still not shipping so i feel like this is a slam dunk case and for them to say we admit no wrongdoing but we obviously i mean they advertise things that they in ship uh so yeah and i i bought i have a 16 pro so i will be getting my 25 to 95 dollars for that

37:46John Siracusa:and i'm excited about that did you have you actually signed up for it yet they don't have i don't think there's a way to sign up for it yet okay that's what i thought but i'm assuming they'll send me an email or you know we'll cover it in the show whatever but i always sign up for these things i always take the money from usually it's you get a piddling amount but hey sometimes it's like a multiple devices in the family so you know both my kids get 30 bucks i get 30 bucks you sure, I'll take the money. But I just, this is probably the least bad ending Apple could have hoped for, that they were allowed to settle and admit no wrongdoing and pay what to them is like, you know, pocket change, nothing, in exchange for probably one of the biggest screw-ups in the past couple of decades, biggest public screw-ups in the past couple of decades, which is at WWDC 2024, showing a bunch of features and then putting ads on TV with a famous star from The Last of Us slash Game of Thrones advertising those features and then to just literally never ship them up till the day we're recording this presumably in all the 27 os's the features they advertise or something similar like them um we'll ship but they still haven't done it and if we had back at wwc20245 said hey we're going to be recording uh right before wwc2026 and none of those features in the ad will have shipped that would be a pretty grim uh pessimistic view but that's the reality we're in right now

39:02Marco Arment:Although, to be honest, would you have been surprised to hear that at the time? I don't know that I necessarily... Because even at the time, it seemed pretty ambitious and pretty concept-y. And we had not yet seen AI do pretty much any of those things with any level of reliability. Normally, look, Apple has a big target on its back because they're big and famous and rich. And so they get all sorts of things levied at them, people attempting to sue them or shake them down. And most of them are BS and most of them are undeserved. This particular one, I think it's not BS and is exactly what Apple deserved for what it actually did.

39:44Marco Arment:i still to this day am surprised that they were so brazen and careless with the way that they advertised those features both the wbc and then in tv in the tv commercials like that that was incredibly negligent and reckless of them to do that so they deserve what happened here this one is 100 on them and in hindsight like it really does i mean i'm sure the story will tell it someday but it really does seem like given that two years who whole years have passed they were just like there's no way that they would have aired an average i mean what they showed wwc fine because that's like a developer community maybe you show whatever but like even that though i don't think that's fine well i mean it's not it's not fine but but at least it's not like here's the thing they they show stuff in wwc and sometimes things don't ship or change before shipping because it's it's the nature of the thing you're seeing a pre-release product you're a developer like you get it but once you put things on television for the public to see that shows me that they really thought that they would eventually get to these things like i mean the only other worst case thing i can think of is like the um the white iphone which they also advertise in television and i believe they really thought well we're having trouble with the white one the iphone white iphone 4 we're having trouble with the white one but you know we'll get it out eventually and they did get it out eventually but it was i forget what it was gruber was just posting about it again it was like 18 months or something something like that right so the usual apple thing is like okay even if it's not ready we all believe that it will be ready in a reasonable time frame like oh yeah sure no it'll totally be ready like we're having difficulty but we'll get it out the door it's like okay fine then we're going to run the ads because i i i think if they if apple actually internally believed that they weren't going to have these features for two years they would not have aired the ad what they thought was we don't have them now but everyone says that we'll probably get them eventually so chip the ad it's important to strike while the iron's hot the pro the the features will come a little bit later than we wanted but it's fine but they they what it comes down to is they did not realize yet that they were not going to be able to do this not that year not the next year like they and they're just mistaken about what they're you know and i hope there was a big uh i mean obviously there was there's big shake up leadership changes all sorts of stuff uh and now they got a new ceo so hopefully the company will not make that mistake and it's basically not knowing yourself like be honest with yourself are we going to ship this or are we not and if internally you have a culture where you're essentially all lying to yourselves about what you're going to do and like i think that has served apple well for years they've always said you know we'll set these aggressive targets we'll tell the team to do the impossible and even if they're a little bit late they'll eventually do it but as i think i complained about at the time it's like this one is different and that there's nothing they can really do to make this happen And that turned out to be the case.

42:30Like, it's not like it's just a simple matter of finding the bugs and fixing them or whatever. It's of a different nature. And it was especially of a different nature because, as it turns out, their, you know, their LLMs that they were working on internally weren't even up to their competitor standards. And as Marco just said, even their competitors weren't doing this at the time. So to believe that they were going to do something that no one else had ever done, even though their internal technology to do that was worse than everybody else's. and that we're going to ship it in a timeframe that justified airing the ad just shows a complete breakdown of accurate self-assessment in a very public way.

43:05We've seen, we've complained about their inaccurate self-assessment in terms of developer sentiment or all sorts of other things. But this was like the most public display of self-delusion. It's corporate self-delusion that Apple has experienced in a long time. Yeah.

43:19John Siracusa:I mean, I generally, I think it was Marco that said this a minute ago, I generally think the class action lawsuits are kind of silly, but like John said, you might as well sign up for them. I think I've told this story briefly on the show before, but long after I got rid of my BMW, there was a water pump related class action lawsuit where if you could prove that you paid for a repair to your water pump in your N55, then you could get, I think it was like a thousand bucks from BMW. And because I'm me, and I keep copious notes on these sorts of things, I was able to produce the receipt from several years prior when I paid Richmond BMW a thousand plus dollars in order to replace my water pump.

43:56John Siracusa:And I got a check from BMW for a thousand bucks. It was incredible. Um, but I, yeah, I think that with regard to the advertising, I do think it's like you were saying that they thought they were going to ship. They really did. Like, yes, it was a bit of hubris, I almost said hubris, a bit of hubris to, um, to, to think that, Oh, we'll definitely ship this. No question. And then not, but I don't think it was ill intentioned. I really do think and get the vibe that they believed that they were going to ship. And then it turns out they very much didn't. And I think they hopefully have learned a lesson.

44:26John Siracusa:It sure seems like they have that they shouldn't be advertising these things unless they are really, truly about to launch or already launched. All right. We have a couple of stories with regard to Apple and Intel and Samsung. So starting on May 4, Mark Gurman writes, Apple Inc. has held exploratory discussions about using Intel Corp and Samsung Electronics Co. to produce the main processors for its device in the US. Apple has had early stage talks with Intel about enlisting the company's chip-making services. Apple executives have made visits to a Samsung plant under development in Texas that will also make advanced chips.

45:00John Siracusa:Discussions with both companies started before the latest shortages took hold. Samsung is already working on building more peripheral components for the iPhone and other products, including ones for managing device power, Apple had said earlier. Additionally, we will point you to a link in Apple's newsroom, wherein they announced they were increasing their U.S. commitment to$600 billion. That's where they said that they were, you know, when German said Apple said earlier, I'm like, wait a second, is this an officially confirmed Apple thing? But it was the press release. Like that's where they said that their Samsung is building stuff for Apple phones.

45:36Not the main SOCs, but I forget what it is. Peripheral components, as German describes it. That is apparently in this press release.

45:42John Siracusa:continuing from german apple prefers to have at least two suppliers for any major component giving it leverage in pricing negotiations and protection from supplier disruptions as far back as 2022 cook told employees in an all hands meeting that and i hi this is casey i didn't remember hearing this particular quote anywhere so this was new to me and certainly i think it was john that bolded it in our internal show notes let me read this quote from cook from 2022 regardless of what you may feel and think 60 coming out of anywhere is probably not a strategic position, referring to chip production concentrated in Taiwan.

46:15Yeah, so this is, I also had not heard this quote, or if I did hear it back then, I had forgotten about it. Again, this is back in 2022, and this is Tim Cook talking to employees, and if you think he's more candid with employees than he is with the public, I don't think he is. Because A, he knows everything's going to leak, and B, I don't think he's candid with anybody like that. But here he is stating plainly, we don't like that we get so much stuff from TSMC. And his thing was like 60%, you know, 60%. If we're getting 60 % of anything from a single place, that's bad. It's like, well, I have bad news, Tim.

46:49That's not going to get better. Like TSMC is making all your chips for the phones. It is just, you know, so it shows that it's not as if Cook was unaware and, you know, repeat for China and other things, not as a cook was unaware that a non-diversified supply chain is bad. it just seems like the process of trying to you know turn that ship and you know whatever it was like a half of new iphones were created in india in the recent batch or something like that like how long does it take to start to diversify your manufacturing to the extent that you can and the answer is many many years here we are in 2026 and they're still working on it and tsmc is still a massive bottleneck but just what the story is about is like the apple looking to intel and Samsung to help them out here.

47:36And, you know, Samsung is already making whatever peripheral components for the iPhone and other products are, but Hey, you know, something is better than nothing. Same thing with diversifying manufacturing and doing more manufacturing in the U S and the various TSMC Arizona plants. Yes, it's still TSMC, but at least it's in Arizona and not Taiwan. So baby steps towards diversification, but I like this quote because it really, if you're looking for proof that, you know, Tim Cook understands that this is a bad situation, at least as far back in 2022, he knew that it's not a good place to be. It's just that in the subsequent four years, he was not able to change that appreciably.

48:11John Siracusa:Continuing from Gurman, since then, Apple has worked closely with TSMC to help expand operations in Arizona, where the supplier now produces a limited number of chips for Apple from a single plant. It's ramping up work quickly for Apple, which said it will get 100 million chips from Arizona in 2026. Apple also is contending with shortages of memory chips, but Cook said that finding enough main processors, the SOCs or systems on a chip, is a bigger challenge right now. Quote, the primary constraint is the availability of the advanced nodes our SOCs are produced on, not memory, Cook said during the earnings call.

48:43John Siracusa:That's making it harder for Apple to satisfy demand for products like the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, he said. Quote, I believe it will take several months to reach supply-demand balance. So that's interesting. This is on the earnings call, I think. Him basically confirming it's like uh ram is not our main problem ram is a problem but it's not our main problem and that makes some sense because you know instead of there being one company in the world that can make the best chips there's three for ram wow an embarrassment of riches i think it's three right isn't it micron um uh yeah sk hinex samsung yeah yeah anyway that's better than one right uh but like what this is arguing for is that like you know the the mac studio with the big ram configs the fact that you can't get that the socs are more of a problem than the ram like that's weird but you know it's plausible because uh the ram is all being used by you know ai data centers but you know it's also being used by a dentist ai data centers nvidia fabbing their gpu things to run all the inference and training uh that whatever the story was that went by recently that like essentially nvidia is now tsmc's biggest customer ousting apple apple used to be tsmc's biggest customer and now it's Nvidia.

49:50So yeah, I guess when they asked for that hot lot of A18 Pros, maybe they bumped some Nvidia GPUs off the line and paid some money to get the FastPass in there. But yeah, this is the most recent earning calls. I believe it will take several months to reach supply demand balance. This is also more bad news for me waiting for a Mac Studio. Tim Cook is saying we can't get the SoCs and that's really bad for products like the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio. So all of that was

50:18John Siracusa:May 4th. Fast forward four days to May 8th. Apple and Intel are perhaps together again. So Robbie Whelan and Rolf Winkler write in the Wall Street Journal, Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture some of the chips that power Apple devices, according to people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal says that it's, quote, still unclear, quote, what Apple products will get Intel chips. Yeah, I don't think there's any more detail on this, but like the right before the 100 million chips from Arizona, like the TSMC Arizona plants are not on the cutting edge, like two nanometer that are also not three nanometer.

50:52I think they're five or maybe seven. I forget. But like the whole idea is like we can't, you know, the best chips still come from TSMC in Taiwan. But if we can take some chips off of that line and manufacture like the mouse, like the older chips, the A chips with lower numbers, the chips that we're still putting in some devices, maybe we put them in our Apple TVs or whatever those aren't three nanometer can we make them somewhere else to free up some capacity in tsmc in taiwan and then we can get them to fab the m5 ultra for us there you know whatever like whatever soc that can only be done in taiwan let's not clog them up with like if they could have asked for that hot lot of a18 pros from somewhere other than taiwan maybe they did for all we know uh that would be great because you don't want to bottleneck that and you know so So I would love to know what Intel is making for them.

51:43Maybe they're making just peripheral like support chips or something. But this is all part of the diversification effort. And I guess it's kind of I mean, I don't know how much to read into this. But like, you know, the Apple in China book talks so much about how Apple just dumped buckets and buckets and buckets of money into China to help turn them into the manufacturing, you know, colossus that they are today. It was a symbiotic relationship. We will dump in lots of money and you will make the things for us and we will pay for them. And we'll just, you know, as we succeed, you'll succeed. But like there was a huge investment there.

52:18And, you know, Apple's press releases say, oh, yeah, we're investing more in U.S. manufacturing or whatever. And going to Samsung and Intel is essentially Apple investing in competitors to TSMC because, hey, you're not going to be able to compete with TSMC unless people buy stuff from you. We want there to be healthy competition for TSMC. So it behooves us to give you money to do whatever. What can you do until? Well, it's like it's kind of like we know you can't make the good chips. But what can you do? Because we want to give you money. We want you to succeed because we need TSMC to have competition.

52:52It's not good. Even setting aside the whole Taiwan and, you know, geopolitical thing, just even if they were regardless of where they are in the world, having one source, you know, is not great. as he said 60 coming out of it one place is not great and i think they're way over 60 for like the iphone chips at least so i think they're going to intel samsung and anyone else who has any chance of manufacturing anything that could be used in any apple product and saying saying to them what can you give us we will pay you if you can give us anything you know we have a bunch of things that need to be fab we got some old chips and small products we want you to not go out of business.

53:30In fact, we want you to do well. So take this money. I just, I don't, but I don't know if reading this is, is this just like a piddling amount of money to satisfy us political BS things or whatever? Or is this the beginning of a China style investment where Apple is going to start funneling more and more of its cash to other companies to try to balance out the lopsided arrangement of a silicon manufacturing.

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55:53John Siracusa:Brandon Wichard writes, how do you actually move and copy files on your Mac? There are plenty of ways, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, command line. I'm curious which approach each of you defaults to and why. Do you switch depending on the situation? The thing that's always bugged me, why can't you move a file with command C and command V? You can use command C and what is that option? Command V, I believe, to actually move it rather than copy it. That feels like an intentional design decision, but I've never heard a good explanation for it. So let me start with how do I move stuff? It depends on the context.

56:19John Siracusa:I will do it with command line. I mostly, do it with Finder. I wouldn't say that's all the time, probably most of the time. I found that, and I've talked about this a long, long time ago, but there's an app called Yoink, Y-O-I-N-K. I don't think they ever sponsored us, but if they did, it was literally like 10 years ago. This is an app, I think it's by an individual person, that what it does is as you drag a file around your screen, it will put up a little sidecar, for lack of a better word. It's like a little floating window on the side of your screen. You can to specify where this floating window goes and you can put things in that window.

56:54John Siracusa:And so that window holds these items as like a little drawer sort of kind of, or shelf, uh, as Sage says in the chat, that's a better word for it. But anyways, it'll hold those items for a little bit. And then you can go click around and find the destination of whatever it is you want to move or copy or what have you, and then drag them out of Yoink and into your destination. And that makes these sorts of things much easier to do with the mouse. And so I would say, generally speaking, uh, finder with yoink occasionally command line um let's start with marco and finish up with john marco

57:23Marco Arment:how do you handle this i actually move and copy files on my mac by opening up two different finder windows the source and destination and dragging them and that's it like you know if i if i'm intending to um if it's going on an external drive and i'm intending to move them i'll have you know hold down what is a commander option to change and i believe yeah just it's muscle muscle memory at this point i just i don't even think about it yeah exactly what modifier are you asking for When you're dragging files to a different drive, the default action is copy. Oh, you want to move it to a thing? Yeah.

57:51Don't do that.

57:51Marco Arment:Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Thanks. And then as for like why you can't move a file basically with cut and paste, I think the answer is like, well, where do the cut files live? Where are they when they are cut? What if you cut and never paste? Are they gone? Do they cut into the trash first? what if you like it creates a weird concept uh because files are like can be you know real solid lots of data whereas like when you're dealing with the clipboard conceptually the pasteboard rather sorry my windows is showing when you're dealing with the paste windows it was called clipboard on the mac before windows even had it okay well anyway the you know that is considered by most people to be like temporary ephemeral data especially people who don't have clipboard history apps um or now the built-in whatever it is in tahoe um that was always considered like throwaway data so if you cut something you it was just like okay well that text is gone or whatever and you know maybe i'll paste it later maybe maybe not files conceptually don't work that way and you know so files files have to live somewhere and i think if you like cut files and then forgot to ever paste them anywhere that might be that like that might cause problems for people or unexpected results or unexpected data loss so i think that's probably the answer so moving copy files um i mostly use the finder for stuff like that um if i am at the command line doing things like i'm you know working on a coding project um I will use the command line to move and copy files there.

59:25I'll use the command line when I want to have a little bit more control over the stuff. Like my various Mac applications that deal with file systems and things. I guess it's just hyperspace, but there are some other, you know, making test files for my other apps or whatever. I'll do that from the command line because I feel like I have more granular control over the files. Especially since like I'm creating like test files or temporary files. I can use the x adder command to mess with the extended attributes. I can, you know, chmod and chown and just, you know, I can mess with the metadata with a variety of command line tools to get the thing exactly the way I want it.

1:00:00When I want to copy a file like a quote unquote Mac file, like it's not a file that's part of a programming project or something, but it's just like a document created by one of my Mac apps, one of my GUI Mac apps. I tend to want to use the Finder just because I just want to, whatever the default metadata handling that the Finder does, I'm like, I'm assuming that's the right thing to do. and that's what apps expect so i would prefer to move in copy files in the finder to do that the command line like the cp command line tool on mac os has at various times been updated to try to stay in sync with something close to the default finder behavior when it comes to copying metadata and acls and all that like this there's tons you don't have no idea how much weird metadata there was in mac files and the mac os cp command can deal with a lot of it but i'm never sure if it's exactly the same behavior as finder copies and if it even is capable of having exactly the same and there's other commands like the ditto command and there's the clone file api there's lots of things you can do from the command line but like for gui mac files and because i'm an old school mac user who was using a mac for a decade and a half before there was a command line i just do it in the finder using the gui and related to that copy and paste of files uh that is a windowsism so from windows did that first and my reaction to it when i learned that windows did it way back in the day was this is a terrible idea for all the things that marco just mentioned okay so you want to use copy and paste files doesn't make any sense but if you want to do it okay but then what do you do about cut hand wavy hand wavy well we'll put a little dotted outline around the file so it won't really be gone it'll still be there we'll just change the appearance of it in windows explorer and if you never paste it or if you copy something else we will remove the little dotted outline from around the file and then you don't have to worry about it you know it all makes sense ever you know like there are ways around it mac os 10 i believe essentially copied the windows implementation of this when it first implemented this um and you could cut copy and paste files and it would do something similar to windows or when you cut it it wouldn't really remove the file it would still be there but the finder would either hide it or dim it or do some other crap like that i use this feature so little as in never except when i was writing my mac os 10 reviews to like test it that i i don't actually know if it still exists my guess before you started talking about my guess would be that you can currently in the finder cut a file and then paste it somewhere i don't know that for a fact because i would never ever do this both out of habit and i think it's a mismatch with the uh like the semantics of cut copy paste are so well established they're not a good match for what people expect from doing file stuff that i would never try come on you try that out right now find a file you don't care about and cut it and then paste it somewhere I bet it will work.

1:02:42Marco Arment:No, there is no, like command X doesn't do anything. You sure? Let's try it. Let's see. Oh, you're right. It's disabled. Well, I'm pretty sure if my memory is correct, I'm pretty sure it used to. And it used to behave as I described and as it does in Windows where it's not really gone. Maybe they changed their mind about that. But honestly, once I stopped writing Mac OS X reviews, I didn't have a reason to explore every feature that I don't use. But all this to say is I never, ever, ever, ever use cut copy and paste for files in the finder because i think that is a bad interface and a bad metaphor for those functions and i was saying to marco don't command drag to another volume to move it because there have been finder bugs in the past where oh by the way that move failed and also the file is now gone from the source and you should think that would never happen but let me tell you the finder sometimes has bugs so i never hold down command to move i always allow it to be the false copy which it is when you cross volumes or explicitly make a copy and only when i'm sure it has landed for real completely successfully on the target volume do i then command delete the you know the source one so uh yeah just it's like defensive driving defensive findering like you know don't yes you can hold down command to turn what would be a copy into a move but don't do that

1:03:58John Siracusa:you know one thing i will say is that it is not infrequent particularly when i'm moving things to or from the Synology that I will do an MD5 of the file on my Mac and the file on the Synology just to make sure they match. Why do I do this? I don't know. Has it ever not matched? I don't think so. I think it's always matched every time. But for whatever reason, I get a little nervous about it occasionally, and I'll do that, and I'll do that via the command line.

1:04:21Marco Arment:What you need is a file system that guarantees integrity with some kind of checksumming. Speaking of that, I got a feature request for Hyperspace the other day. It was like when you're doing like reviewing the files that it found that have like they put some of these groups of identical files and you're reviewing them there's a little like a whatever sf symbol for the eyeball like the quick look eyeball thing where you're gonna hit space bar and get like a quick look preview of the file so you you know can glance at it in the app instead of having to open it in the finder or whatever to see what's in it to see whether you want to merge it anyway um is it hey when you do that and you make you find a group of identical files you've just got the one little eyeball icon but you do show the list of all the files in the group i would like an eyeball icon next to all the files in the group i'm like well the point of the program is those files are identical so they would all do the same thing he's like yeah but i just want to make sure i'm like listen if you want to make sure don't use my app yes the whole app is premised on oh i'm going to make sure right if you don't think the app is doing that why would you trust my eyeball icons to show you the things i'm debating adding that feature it's like the paranoia feature like like are you gonna eyeball a text file or a giant like image file and say yeah i know these are identical it's like it's like kcmd5 you think it's like well it says it copied it but can i check and i'm like well i could let you visually inspect the files but like like they're they're the whole point is they're the same file and if they're not i'm not gonna anyway i'm still debating what to do with that one like i know why people will want to check but it's like man if my program doesn't get that right it's going to be destroying everybody's day it's gonna be real bad as i as i replace files with different files that have different contents that would be really really bad which to be clear could theoretically happen but i have so far knock on wood zero literally zero reports of that ever happening to anyone i hope it never happens to anyone i try my best but as i say in the the help documentation for hyperspace could it happen yes it absolutely positively could because of the magic of race conditions and the inability in macOS to get an exclusive lock on a file because that's just not

1:06:28John Siracusa:how it works all right chris harper writes do you use a profile or theme for your terminal windows or just the default macOS profile uh for me i was a terminal user always until just a few months ago and i'll get to that in a second but while i'm using the terminal i don't know why but i need to have a black background with white text on top and so what i do is i set the in the out-of-the-box theme called Pro as my default. And that gives me the look that I prefer. You should try Ultra. Well done. Well done. That being said, a few months ago, I decided to try Prompt 3, mostly because I wanted a better terminal for my iPad.

1:07:08John Siracusa:And I've bounced through several different terminals on iPad over the years, and none of them have been exactly what I wanted. And Prompt is probably as close as I've gotten to what I want. And so once I started using it on the iPad, I started using it on the Mac. And so now I'm pretty much all in on prompt three, and we will link that in the show notes. Since I started with Marco last time, let's start with John. John, what do you do? When Mac OS X first came out and had the terminal in it and the betas and everything, the default theme was, I believe, I believe it was Monaco 9 back in the day, like bitmap Monaco 9.

1:07:44And it would show at bitmap, like no smoothing, no subpixel anti-aliasing, just like sharp individual non-retina pixels for what is essentially a pixel font from the you know the earliest days of the mac nine point monaco uh on a white background so the window had white background and the text was black and the only tweak i made to that default theme was i changed the cursor to a block because i was used to that from using literal hardware vt220s back at bu and they had block cursors albeit on interlaced crts but anyway um i made the cursor a block and i make the block because in terminal apple's terminal you can have it like be a block or an ibeam or like an underscore or whatever and you can also make it blink or not blink i made it not blink made it a block and made it zero zero or 255 zero zero complete red right and over the years the only thing i have changed in that theme has been to mess with the font because eventually uh getting uh non-anti-alias non-subpixel anti-alias bitmap monaco 9 i did all the hacks you could do to keep that as my terminal font for a long long long time down to the point where there were bugs with showing that in terminal and i would complain about them on mac os 10 reviews to get them fixed which worked yay running the press always helps especially when you are the press um but you know eventually like retina comes retina comes for us all and say goodbye to your bitmap fonts and so i did and i had to pick a new font i actually have to look this up because i don't even know i think i might have done menlo for a while what am i doing now now i'm doing monaco 12 all right because i'm old and i can't see as well and my monitor is very big so i'm doing monaco 12 obviously it's a retina display so it is i have anti-alias text unchecked but i believe it is anti-aliasing because i don't know let me zoom in it's got it's got to be yeah it is the next is anti-aliased i don't know what that checkbox still does in apple's terminal but in the text section uh of my theme which is just called john it's called uh jcs at various times uh it's monaco 12 font and anti-os text is unchecked my cursor is red it is a block it does not blink um and everything else is basically the default and that's what i go with um i was kind of surprised to see i was recently i recently had occasion to keep to create a fresh user account on tahoe to test a beta version of some other app and i opened a terminal to do some stuff and i I guess this is the default terminal theme in Tahoe.

1:10:11Like there's a fresh user account not associated with any Apple ID. So I don't see how it could be anything other than the default. And it opened a window that had basically a black background with, I think maybe a little transparency on it and like white or otherwise light colored text on it. And it looked pretty attractive. Like for a, you know, for a dark theme terminal, I was like, oh, this is actually a pretty nice default. I don't prefer it. I am a black text on a white background kind of guy. and I was very excited when macOS 10 came out that my preferences were so close to the default.

1:10:44But yeah, ever since, you know, whatever, macOS DP2, developer preview 2, macOS 10 developer preview 2, I've been using this basically the same terminal theme. And I have to say the Apple terminal application, which I believe is currently maintained by 0.15 employees, it has a lot of features but its interface is not i'm not able to understand how it works enough to get it to do what i want uh and in particular if the 0.15 of people who maintain this app are listening or ever hear this i'm pretty sure i i'm pretty sure that apple terminal application has the ability to restore the windows that were open during the last session like if i quit the app and launch it It will restore the windows that are open during the last session, including all the tabs and all the windows.

1:11:39And also restore the current working directory of all the tabs and all the windows to what they were before. I know it maintains the scroll back and says, here was what was in the scroll back when you quit the app. Sometimes, in some conditions, I've been able to get it to restore the tabs, the windows, and the current working directories. But most of the time, I can't. And I cannot figure out for the life of me how to get this to happen. they have so many concepts of saved window groups and what you do on launch and just it's so so complicated so i keep waiting is this going to be the year that the 0.15 developer goes through those settings sweeps through there and says i just want to make this a sensible set of settings that works you know like bb edit or something or say hey do you want me to restore windows from the previous session if i do restore windows do you want me to restore the current working directory do you want me to restore the tab titles do you want me to store the scroll back and i'll be like yes yes yes yes yes and that would make sense to me as it stands now i have no idea what my current apple terminal settings are but i do know that it doesn't restore the current working directors but it does restore the windows in the tab so i'm like just don't touch it and when i make a fresh account on newer versions of mac os i make a fresh account and i try to get it to do what i want and i can only get like 50 of the way there the current working directory is the one that kills me because i've seen it do it i know it's possible and i think it's a terminal thing and not a shell thing but i can't figure it out for the life of me so please please apple someday work on terminal again even though i do really like it there's a couple features that i wish it had marco i am

1:13:07Marco Arment:pretty boring here i use the default basic theme which is white background black text um and i use the sf mono 11 font which i think might be the default long time ago i was also very much a um a Monaco person. But at some point, I had to increase the font size by like one and that broke the bitmapness of that font and made me have to switch. Same thing with Xcode and with TextMate. A few years back, I basically increased the font size by one and had to change everything as a result. But yeah, it's fine. And I think the Apple Terminal app is totally fine. It is not like a ridiculously amazing power user app, but I don't need it to be because I'm not that much of a terminal power user.

1:13:56Marco Arment:I always have terminal windows open, and I'm always using terminals, but I'm not such a power user that I need any kind of really advanced features that for whatever reason this wouldn't support. So I've always been pretty happy with it. I've messed with other terminal apps a lot, like Prompt. I've mostly only used it on the iPad and phone, but I don't know if I've ever even tried the Mac version. It's probably like ARM only, so I probably haven't on my Mac anyway. um but there's the tricky thing about terminal apps and there's so many of them like i have like iterm2 and there's the other even fancier ones a bunch of them tout their performance because you know you're like it's a window full of text it should be lightning fast it's like well guess what you know and this text editors do the same thing the philosophy i figure which text editor had this philosophy but it's a good summation of the uh um the design strategy which is we're going to create a terminal text editor whatever but we're going to treat it like a game that was zed yeah like a game engine in terms of like gpu rendering and stuff like that like we're not going to design it like a text editor we're going to design it like a game with like how quickly can we render and it's like well you're not rendering polygons or textures you're rendering text like i know but we want to render text like as fast as possible so zed is one of them there's a bunch of other text editors that have taken this philosophy and there's also terminal apps that have been like back in the day we use open gl to do special custom rendering of text we don't use the system tech system like we want it to be really really fast uh and i i love that philosophy i'm like i want that too like you know i remember my days using more primitive systems like those vt220s which were not fast but also like the you know the techtronics x x terms uh with like bitmap displays with no compositing just blitting out to the screen and they were pretty fast back in the day but the apple terminal has always been pretty fast it's okay like it's not lightning lightning fast but it's pretty fast and the apple terminal has also always had the option for essentially infinite scroll back where you could say how long do you want your scroll back to be and the choice this is from the next days its choices are like you can pick a number of lines or you can say i think they have called it unlimited they used to call it like until you run out of memory or like memory limited or whatever so i've always just put it on unlimited because you know i've got a lot of ram why the heck not um if you use one of those other terminal apps that's designed like a game or like a fancy open jail engine or the ones that used to simulate crts remember those it would like it would curve it and everything i never use those those are all fun but like especially like the the like the really fast ones the things they get wrong in their defaults make me have to spend an hour with their stupid text-based config files because they always have text-based config files they don't want to make a gui for it right things like things you take for granted in the apple terminal look at an apple terminal window right now and let me tell you the things that you are taking for granted about this window that you don't realize that you will, maybe you won't, but that I will miss when they're gone.

1:16:48Look at just a terminal window that you have now and put some text in it, like type LS or something to fill the thing. Here are things you're taking for granted. How much space is there between the first character on the left edge and the, you know, the edge of the window? How much space is there between lines of text? How much space is there between the first line and the top of the window and the bottom of the into all the margins, all the spacing, all the text layout, you just take for granted. It's like, it's just a window full of text, right? Until you use one of those fancy OpenGL GPU powered terminal apps and you're, and like the line spacing is wrong and they're too close or too far away from the edge.

1:17:22And so you go into the settings and you're like, what is the setting for this? And you're typing, you're typing floating point numbers into a text file and making the app reloaded to try to get something that looks quote unquote normal to you. And I cannot stand that. and like just make it nice you can't don't let the letters touch the edge of the thing but don't make it like too much space and like the the line spacing is always all messed up and like the font rendering is different like we don't use the system finder and we use our own font rendering and and put in a a integer value from one to seven thousand for darkness i'm like what i just can you just make the text look good and granted it's just like you know i'm used to what i'm used to and i'm used to the apple terminal but it's not like you know i went from i went from monaco 9 to monaco 12 it's not like i'm you know i think i stopped off in menlo and some other fonts in between there so i'm like i'm not opposed to change but we all had a menlo phase yeah i don't i don't want to have to uh i don't want to have to tweak stuff like that like give me sensible defaults is what i'm saying and i think the sort of like the uh the aesthetic taste of the people who make these highly accelerated uh terminal and text editor apps is so divergent from mine that what they think are sensible defaults, I think are just like stabbing me in the eye.

1:18:33Wow. How do you really feel, John? Because I want those and I go in them and I try to edit them. I have a terminal window open next to it and I'm like, I'm going to make this window look just like Apple Terminal. And I try and I try and I try. I'm like, it's close, but it's like I just spent an hour on this and I can't quite get to be the same as Terminal. I go, you know what? I'm just going to stick with Apple Terminal for another year.

1:18:52Marco Arment:Yeah, I just, I've never had any motivation to move from Apple Terminal because I use it so much and I know it so well. I can say all the same things about Apple Mail. I know these programs so much. I use them so well. And even though other apps have come out that offer different power user features that might be useful to me here and there, they're so ingrained in my workflow, my habits, my aesthetic, what my computer looks like, how things work, so many different minor detail levels. and even if something else is better in some way it's probably so far nothing has really been compelling enough for me to replace these apps that's better that because it has to be like a lot better in some way to make it worth the inertia of moving and tolerating like what you're just saying tolerating all the things that might be a little bit worse or need a little bit of work or a little bit of setup or a little bit of learning like there's a huge perceived switching cost to switching like a core app that you've used for decades and you use all the time.

1:19:55Marco Arment:So any alternative has to be a lot better for it to be worth it. And I've just I've never found anything that was that much better in ways that I actually needed or cared about. And also, I haven't had enough dissatisfaction with these built in apps to motivate me to even want to move in the first place. You would think of the various apps that do restore all the windows and the positions and the tabs and the tab titles and the working directories that that would be enough to bring me over but it's like it's like changing text editors it's like okay um i like that but now i have to do a bunch of extra work to get your new thing set up the way my old thing was and it's probably possible but it is a lot of work and it's work that i find frustrating especially if i can't get it exactly right so in the end i just don't change because basically i i'm like of all the built-in apps in mac os despite the fact the terminal gets no love and its settings are incomprehensible.

1:20:46Like the mix of like all those that are just, it's madness. Like try to come up with a mental model on how like their presets work with their window groups, with their save sets, with their on launch set. Like it's, I cannot understand how it works, but the day-to-day experience of using the terminal windows is like they work. They do what I want. I'm satisfied with them. All right.

1:21:05John Siracusa:And kind of related Chris Harper, the same Chris Harper writes also, do you use any other IDEs when working on projects outside of Xcode or do you just do everything in a terminal window? For me, I use Visual Studio Code for website stuff, and I think that's basically it. I don't think I use any other kind of IDE for anything. Who's just turned us to go first? John, I think? Yeah, so the only thing I use Xcode for is writing Mac apps. That's the only time I'm ever in Xcode because I don't prefer any aspect of it to my other tools that I use. except for, of course, when you're writing Mac apps, because it's just, it's the least friction way to do it.

1:21:46I don't dislike the Xcode editor. I think it's fine. I basically leave things mostly default there as well, but it doesn't have anything that makes me say, oh, no, I want to edit everything here. And honestly, Xcode doesn't make that particularly pleasant either. Like they, you can use it as just like, oh, I'm just going to use Xcode as my text editor. You can do that, but Xcode fights you a little bit on it. And Casey's complained in the past about how the heck tabs are supposed to work out and keep changing their mind about it. And I'm a separate windows kind of guy anyway which xcode can do but it also fights you on that oh you wanted a separate window guess what your separate windows got three sidebars and a bottom thing oh you know i can turn them off but it's just anyway xcode only for mac stuff the modern answer to this question i think this question has been in here since before this happened but the modern answer to this question is yeah like codex and claude code there's my my other ide's that i'm using and and i'm not really for my mac apps my three dinky mac apps which are mostly like already written i'm not using the coding agents to code in them i'm using the coding agents to try to find bugs or to try to help me diagnose crash reports by like reverse uh you know disassembling binaries as part of app kit to be like help me find this bug i cannot figure it out and honestly they can't figure it out either so we're all having trouble here but anyway the bottom line is i'm in a terminal window in the project directory of my xcode project add a claud or codex prompt feeding it you know dragging in a dot ips crash report file into the window which is you know this if you case you don't know this if you use terminal you just grab any file and drag it into the terminal window we'll put the full path the escaped full path of the thing that you dragged in in there that's a feature of apple terminal it's very convenient you can do that with coding agents and so that's i guess my other ide for mac apps these days is claude and codex and occasionally i've used the gemini one but i didn't like it um for everything else it's bbedit for me so i'm if i'm writing node stuff i'm using bb i'd like pearl b everything everything that is not a mac app i am using bd which is not an ide really it's a text editor but i have a lot of features built up like when i'm when i'm writing my blog post which happens every once in a while um or just editing the editing editing my website i'm writing html and bb edit with all my weird macros and text snippets and like i you know i forget how much stuff i've customized and bbedit until like you know you launch bbedit on my wife's account on her computer and i type keystrokes and either nothing happens or the wrong thing happens like oh yeah i guess that's a customization i've been using for two decades i thought that was the default keystroke but apparently it's not and then i find out not only is that not a default keystroke that feature doesn't even exist but it's an apple script from like 1997 that i've been using since then that is bound to that keystroke and i gotta find the anyway i am so like like anyone who has used a text editor for a long time you get so entrenched and it's the same thing like if you wanted to use a different id or a different system i've i have all these ones installed i've used visuals your code sublime atom like you name any kind of ide text editor thing for the mac i i have used it tried it probably still haven't installed in some version zed which i've got that i've got everything i have a big applications folder right i always try them i'm always interested in them but i always end up coming back to bb edit um just because i have so much stuff built up there and yeah i could recreate my bb edit world elsewhere but it would be a lot of work for not a particularly big win so yeah and and ever since bb edit gained language server support many releases ago i've been in the habit of updating and expanding the the language language service support lsp language server protocol is like a a specification for how text editors talk to things that know the structure of source code so you can do things like right click something and say take me to the definition of this or bring up quick help or whatever all the things that you expect to have an ide bb edit which is not really an ide it's just a text editor has these features so i can edit a shell script a json file an html file xml for an rss feed like anything you could possibly imagine bb edit understands it like php i paid money for a commercial extension to bb edit for like a the whatever intellis sense but it's spelled with a ph because php um that lets me do ide like stuff in bb edit with the php source that i'm messing with like and obviously i have them for pearl and node and all that stuff i know this is ridiculous because you're like visual studio code does that and 10 000 other things i am very aware that visual studio code has so many more features it's just a bb edit person from head to toe and i've been using it for so long that i'm probably never going to leave it and so that's where i do everything else having anything to do

1:26:19Marco Arment:with source code marco um yeah so xcode for ios apps obviously um but yeah for other for anything else that i'm that i'm doing like in a text editor for me i'm still using the ancient textmate 2 oh my it i mean it's really showing its age in lots of ways hey at least it still runs it does it still runs you know it's certainly obviously it's in tahoe squircle icon jail it still works but i i am just now starting to think like the reason i was able to call it zed so quickly earlier was like i saw the blog post breeze by about like it's how awesome it is i'm like maybe i should actually start looking at these modern text editors now that like we are in an inflection point now where like ai coding agents are now it being integrated into our workflows like the world is shifting this might be a time for me to finally jump to something more modern like all the things that john was just talking about having like php intellisense kind of or intellisense i don't know where they even put the p in there but having that like you know autocomplete or any kind of integration or you know god forbid a debugger in my ide or in my text editor.

1:27:27Marco Arment:I've never had that for any web development stuff. I've only ever had that kind of advanced functionality in Xcode. I've never, like all the PHP I've ever written in my entire career, every web backend I've ever written, I've done without any of those tools. I've done with just text editors and looking up things and documentation and having things, you know, if I mistypped something, having it just fail on runtime or something. So I'm interested in that world of like making making my non Xcode development more modern. But right now, I'm I have not yet done that. So the answer still is TextMate, too.

1:28:10Marco Arment:But it is not an answer I can actually recommend to anybody because it is very dated. It does seem pretty clearly abandoned and not even for a short amount of time, for a significant amount of time. I think it's been abandoned for most of the time that I have had a son. So it's been a while. But the only thing is, exactly what John was just saying, and what I was saying in the last answer, when I have tried other things, like back between TextMate 1 and 2, I briefly was, I tried Sublime Text and a couple other ones. I don't even remember all of them that I tried. But it was like previous code being like the thing everyone did and i was they were fine i learned i can switch i just don't want to and then when textmate 2 came out it did everything i wanted so i guess i've been using that since but i think like the problem when when i try to switch i do have a lot of paper cuts i have to get over of things like little muscle memory keyboard shortcuts or little behaviors that have always worked some way in textmate that work differently in the thing i'm using next.

1:29:23Marco Arment:It's just, it's a lot of friction to get over. So again, there has to be a good motivating reason. There has to be like both a push to get me off of what I'm using and a pull of like, you know, what is going to pull me towards this other alternative? Like what's going to be a compelling, good, new, useful set of features or benefits or whatever for the new thing. And so far, I have not yet had a compelling push away from TextMate or a pull towards anything else to make that jump worth doing. But I do think now, again, with agents coming into workflows more and all these new tools that I really could and should be using to make my PHP coding a little bit less of a manual and error-prone process, I should probably start looking at that.

1:30:12Marco Arment:So I think i will look at that in the near future you know speaking of uh not using an ide also for my entire 25 years of having a jobby job and writing pearl and node code and stuff like that i was using bb edit and it didn't have language server support so i had the closest thing i had was that at some point in bb edits history they added a function pop-up menu that understood pearl so you could pop up the menu at the top and you know you'd see the list of all the functions in the file and you it's like one of them and jump to that function uh but nothing in the in the document of like right click this and go to the definition or you know forget about like find symbol or refactor rename all these features that you take for granted in like modern ids were not there so i was writing my pearl mostly just like no features no nothing just like marco you just you type you find out whether it runs no autocomplete no you know tab completing symbols even for common you no library nothing just nothing there's no anything and i knew it existed i like i'd used it what is it um intellisense was that the first one in windows the first like sort of autocomplete in uh what was that called casey visual studio just visual studio by the way when i when i said intellifense i was joking but that's apparently actually the the name of the php as i said that's what i was trying to pronounce was that yeah yeah but you said they put a p somewhere but i just i was just guessing a ph yeah for his php oh wow yeah i mean i don't know what anyway i you know i had used it without this stuff and when i started doing you know after i quit my jobby job and was just doing this and then suddenly i'm editing php i was like i have to do something to make this not as painful and so i'm like well it would be great if i could right click a thing and find definition and i'm like well there's got to be a way to do that bb edits got language server support it pointed me to this uh and i bought it immediately you know it's definitely been worthwhile uh one thing this is a question for both of you like well maybe you don't have maybe marco does with his text mate stuff but like a couple of keystrokes that i am accustomed to in bb edit i found that i could not live without an xcode and xcode does let you customize most key bindings of stuff in the ide but the features aren't exactly the same as bb so i mentioned the function pop-up before i bound and i believe this is a custom binding in bb edit i bound control f to basically will pop up that pop-up menu the function pop-up menu it'll instead of me having to click it i just hit ctrl f and it will pop up and then you can type to like narrow the list and use it you know you basically with the keyboard you can jump to a function definition and xcode has a feature that's sort of like that which i cannot for the life of me ever remember whether right now i can't remember what it is so anytime i have a fresh xcode setup like i have need to bind ctrl f to that to that thing what is it called it's like show item is it in the go menu is it one of those things it's not in the menu but you can only find in the settings and so i think i have a screenshot saved in a notes document saying hey dummy when you go set up xcode and you're trying to remember what you bind ctrl f to it's this and then of course it always conflicts with like move forward one character which is this insane emacs based key binding that lots of editors like to do like i will never want ctrl f because in emacs by the way i immediately bound in 1993 i bound ctrl f to find because i'm a mac user i'm like no ctrl f is not move forward one character ctrl f is fine and then i would go to anyone else's emacs and i'd hit ctrl f and the cursor would move forward one space and i'd be like so i have a bunch of weird habits from bb edit that i poured over to xcode do you take any text mate key bindings and or do either one of you customize any of your key bindings in xcode to either enhance them or make them feel familiar from like VS Code or TextMate?

1:33:51Marco Arment:No. The main reason why is I don't like having a whole bunch of custom settings that I have to change. Because like, you know, I set up a new laptop every couple of years. I'm always like, I just, and you know, if I have to use some other setup or some default setup, like I don't want to be totally lost and broken. And I just, I don't like having things that are that custom. I try to stick to default behaviors and looks mostly, most of the time, unless I really hate it. Now, what I do customize in Xcode, like settings I do change, are around things like indentation. I do not like the default indentation rules that Xcode uses.

1:34:35What are they? I don't even know what they are.

1:34:36Marco Arment:They suck. And I also don't like the editor inserting the closing brace or parenthesis or whatever for me. So I turn off those things, and I do indentation and closing punctuation manually. There are certain rules of indentation that Apple has used. Even in Objective-C, the way they would indent very long methods to break over multiple lines. Sometimes they would line up the colons. It was weird. And then in Swift, some of the ways they do it are just super not compatible with my taste. I also think the Swift switch statement. That has a separate setting for that. I was so excited when I saw that because I also disagree with the way so the way they do switch statements but there's a setting like there's all the indentation settings in xcode but there's this separate setting which is like hey when I do switches do you want me to do it the way I want to do it or the other way and it's like no the other way where is that because I switched that setting I'm looking I'm looking right now I can tell you where in it because I basically we're disagreeing with is I believe it it pushes like the case statements to be like the same indentation level is the opening switch which is it looks so wrong i hate it and yes that's what they do it's wrong and i i just opened i just launched xcode i'll find the setting for you i believe there's a separate setting just for the switch statement stuff good yeah editing indentation oh wow they i forgot they just changed xcode settings to be this stupid indent switch statement case labels oh there you go but it's saying it is indenting it well so mine is set to swift in c languages i

1:36:11John Siracusa:I don't think that's the default. I think the default was like none. The default is Swift, I believe. Or none.

1:36:16Marco Arment:No, mine is set that way too, but it doesn't indent them. Mine does. I have it on Swift and C languages and when I do a case statement it's indented from the Swift. Yeah, same. I'll have to play with it. It's certainly, like if I let it do the autocomplete thing where like if it's switching over an enum, John,

1:36:33Marco Arment:like the auto-generated code that it generates still has them all shoved against the left. Yeah. I mean, try it. That's what I have it set to and it does the right thing for me um as for settings on stuff like i'm of the opinion like i don't super duper customize it but like i've proven to myself that there's certain things that i just can't live without or can't deal with or just i disagree with so there's always going to be some customization and i'm of the opinion that every single modern mac application should have a way to cloud sync settings if that's what you want and the ones that don't like xcode drive me bonkers like guys come on like two areas one obviously settings like if you customize your settings i'm not saying you have to cloud sync it for everybody but you know apple does have this thing called icloud and settings aren't that much data give me the option to cloud sync my xcode settings and let me say if i want to or don't want to i can have sets of settings like it's not that complicated they could totally do it the other thing with xcode in particular is all your signing certificate crap icloud keychain it's synced through icloud but xcodes like you know all xcodes crap it's like well some of it we sync through icloud keychain but sometimes when we make it we'll make it in your local keychain so when you go over another mac it won't be there and that's a security feature and yada yada just please just give me the checkbox it says just do it all through icloud keychain i don't want to have to think about all my signing crap i don't want to accidentally make new versions on different laptops where i'm doing development just icloud sync everything so if you're out there making a mac app and you have any kind of substantial settings that are not just like two screens worth of checkboxes or something like xcode's got to have like hundreds or thousands of settings cloud sync those optionally please give us the option to it because the xcode i don't customize a lot but the stuff i do customize i have discovered that i can't live without and it has made me non-functional on default xcode the one that is probably the worst is for whatever reason i guess this is from was it visual studio i guess it was visual studio like i'm thinking of like again 1992 1993 the when you make windows 95 apps and this ide on windows casey what would would that have been would that have been visual studio as well are you thinking like mfc i think

1:38:36John Siracusa:there's like yeah yeah but what was the ide called oh that was before my time anyway uh that ide had a button that you would press to make essentially what xcode would call an archive build of your application and xcode by default i believe does not have a key binding to the thing that says make me an archive build and don't put up a dialogue just do it just make an archive build and i bound that to command shift a for archive and i had to steal it from the thing that every presenter uses at wwc when they bring up that little pop-up i like what is that quick entry like command shift a is a is one of the most commonly typed keystrokes in wwc videos because it doesn't do an archive build by default it does that other thing and i never use that other thing and i have and i've stolen it from it so i just feel like i just i just want to hit command shift a and do an archive build that's like i feel like it's like the i'm ready to ship this new test flight build command shift a and then i just walk away and wait to see the organizer window pop up so a couple of settings like that like control f command shift a um i believe i bound command j to jump to line even though you could already do command l to jump to line just because bb edit does command j like i'm a little bit of that crossover because if i don't do that i find myself i can't successfully mode switch i end up hitting the wrong key so yeah i don't i don't have too many tweaks, but some stuff I can't live without.

1:40:00Marco Arment:All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Zapier, and Quince. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every episode has an extra topic, usually 15, 20 minutes long, maybe. And it's just for members. You can join atp.fm slash join to hear it. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about non-developers now building apps. Obviously, AI tools playing a role here. We're going to talk about that. So if you want to hear that, join us once again, atv.fm slash join.

1:40:34Marco Arment:Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-I-S-S M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental

1:41:34John Siracusa:Accidental Tech Podcast So long Overtime average is up to 25.7 minutes. I know you wanted to know. Oh, thank you.

1:41:45Marco Arment:I will update my outro accordingly.

1:41:47John Siracusa:All right, John. You want to tell us about this thing that's been living in our show notes for like two years? oh goodness now i have to review it okay um so yeah it has been here for a long time because it's weird and and boring i believe the origin was this thread in apple's developer forums where there's like an answer from an apple dts engineer trying to explain a particular behavior i think the discussion was like someone's using like url objects in like some apple platform code um or maybe it's bookmark objects or whatever apple apple has started using many many years ago like urls for local file system stuff like instead of http colon slash i have to do file colon slash slash just just for yeah for uniformity we can use urls to refer to anything whether it's a local file or you know there's a bunch of reasons why you may not do that and may not want to do that we'll get to that in a little bit um but anyway uh various apis take these or produce these and like uh someone was surprised when they got one of those url things i think and I think it might have been a bookmark from the system.

1:42:49And they're like, I was just trying to get like a path to a file, you know, slash a slash b slash c dot text. And what it gave me was a path that said slash period, no follow all one word slash a slash b slash c dot text. And I was like, what, what the hell is slash dot no follow? That's not a directory of the level of my hard drive. And why did the system, because they were doing like a string comparison, like this string should be ABC. and they're like no sorry that doesn't match the string is actually dot no follow ab's like what and so an engineer tried had to explain this and that set off a whole big discussion of like stuff that exists in the mac file system that you might not expect or things that have special meaning so there are various things that you can put in file paths as in string separated by forward slashes on mac os that have meaning to the system dot no follow is one of them i believe it tells it not to follow sim links in the directory that follows or something like that we'll link to this stuff and you can look up the specific meanings i don't remember it off the top of my head um and the reason the explanation is like hey the system api provides this because we're trying to protect against security flaws that happen where um a path looks like the path you expect it to be but some path in the middle of that path specification is actually a sim link to a different place and so we you know there's various modes of the apis where you can say hey traverse this thing but don't follow sim links but that requires the developer to have to remember oh and every time you call this function make sure you pass the option that says oh yeah and don't follow sim links because this is a security related thing and i don't want you being like led astray by some sneaky sim link that sends you off to a place where you're not supposed to be so don't follow sim links but every developer doesn't remember to do that well it turns out that apple has an inline way in the path itself so that no matter what api you what apple api you feed it to the apple api or the underlying file system or whatever will say hey even if you didn't pass the nofollow thing i see that this path here is dot nofollow and i will just remove that part of the path not take it as a real folder but now i know that you don't want me to follow sim links and so the api started returning these dot nofollow links basically like every single you know url object or whatever you got from these apis always had dot nofollow in it and so it was blowing up everybody's string comparisons but the apple person is like this is intended we're basically like protecting against people for forgetting to pass the don't follow sim links flag in the api calls now actual file system security is way more complicated than that let me see if i have the the link to that in here somewhere no i don't think i do there was i'll dig it out if i can remember it for the next episode but there was a um someone posted from a unix slash linux perspective how difficult it is to securely traverse the file system and it is monstrously difficult like just way way way harder than you think it is if you are a not a developer at all you don't think about it at all if you're a sort of not novice to medium developer you know about like the easy things to look out for but then there's always this stuff that's like way beyond the ken of like any sort of average developer who doesn't specialize in file systems to actually securely traverse a linux style unix file system and unfortunately for apple the no follow thing is not a complete solution for the reasons this thing explained i'll try to find a link if i can but anyway uh getting back to mac os dot no follow is not the only one of these weird things that exist there's another page that i'll link to that is uh from 2019 talking about files that have special meanings so if you have a well this this explanation i'm assuming it's accurate because i don't know any better but i'll get to how you can tell for sure in a bit um if any file or directory where the name contains dot no sync is ignored by icloud synchronization any file or directory where the name contains dot no index is ignored by spotlight any file or directory where the name contains dot no backup is ignored by time machine now there are other ways to do a lot of these things with like extended attributes and obviously dragging the things into the time machine exclude list and it writes to a plist somewhere and all that other stuff but like these like special magic files or the one where it's like uh file uh slash dot dot named fork slash rsrc to get to the resource fork of a file another magical thing that you can type that has special meaning to the os there are a bunch of these things in mac os that maybe you hear about years ago and you try using and then forget about or maybe some utilities using it behind the scenes but they tend to stay there for a long time um and writing hyperspace i had occasion to have to actually like find out the real truth of these things because i needed to either rely on them or handle them or whatever and this is one of the things that i really enjoyed about hyperspace in particular i'm used to for all of my regular career as a developer having access to the source code of the libraries and operating system that i'm working on it makes things so much easier when that's true now obviously i don't have the source code to app kit or swift ui and god i wish i did many many times that's what i'm using the stupid coding agents and like disassemble i i bought a copy of hopper so i could use a disassembler just like i need to see what what is this api doing i need like i want to see the source code right but for file system stuff remember that apple mac os 10 mac os and ios and ipad os and audio os and vision os xros every operating system apple makes essentially is based on darwin apple's bsd unix and mox combination operating system and that is open source darwin is open source and guess where all the file system stuff is it's in darwin all the low-level file system stuff is in there now darwin is difficult to navigate it will link you to apple's open source which is on github but you can see they do source code releases for every release of ios and mac os and all the other things to see the darwin base code for there and this file system stuff like who handles dot nofollow that i haven't looked this up but i'm pretty sure that's going to end up being in the apple open source what about dot dot named fork slash rsrc where is that that's in the open source and so if you're wondering hey how does this stuff actually work you can get the source code for it and it is incredibly illuminating because i don't know if apple like is more lax with like uh private api use or whatever like that you know spi analysis where it's trying to say are you using private apis that you're not supposed to be using they mostly care about using like private apis and app kit and stuff sometimes you can sneak one by if you're using like an api in the darwin you know low level unix operating system that someone had neglected to add to the list of private stuff and you're like well i'm not sure if i should be using this or if it works at all but i do have the source code for it so i'm pretty sure i know how it works and you will find treasures in there like the named fork and i'm assuming like the dot no follow i'm not sure if the dot no backup dot no index and dot no sink are in there they might be at higher level code that we don't have the source for but it really makes me wish that essentially we have the source for all these things because it makes development so much easier it makes debugging problems so much easier i mean people could give patches that think about you file a radar and nothing happens for a year imagine if you could send a pull request and say hey i have the source i found the bug i think this fixes it they'd probably reject it but they're like oh you can't fix it in that way because i break some other thing yada yada but maybe that would motivate them to you know fix it more quickly but anyway if you're ever doing anything related to low-level stuff especially low-level file system stuff look at the apple open source repository because you will find the source code to the thing that is doing that stuff on mac os and ios and all those other operating systems and then finally related to all this there has been a there was a recent uh swift evolution proposal these are all like se something which is swift evolution hyphen some number which is like a proposal for the for some change to the swift language and they go through a review process and blah blah blah this one is a proposal to add a file path to the standard library which is a nice final extraction for file paths um this is not the thing i was talking about about how hard it is to do secure file system traversal linux i still have to find that one for the show notes but this describes file path you know an abstraction for as opposed to using urls for everything this is a you know an abstraction for local file system file paths but it's cross-platform because again swift doesn't just run on mac os also runs on linux and windows and lots of other platforms and they they want this language to not just be an apple platform language so they're trying to make it work everywhere and a portable implementation of file path that works on mac os linux and windows is a useful abstraction it already exists they would like to add it to the swift standard library they would like to stop depending on url which i think is part of foundation which is part of apple platform crap so they're like we need one that is not tied to apple platforms at all i would encourage you to the very least skim the file path you know the what is this one se0529 the proposal to add file path to the standard library skim it to see what is involved in file path and you will be probably surprised by at least one or two things in here about wait that's a valid file path you can do that because when you try to come up with an abstraction file path like that's really easy it's just a bunch of path components and uh separated by some separator and there's some semantics about that but yeah maybe it's a little tricky with character encodings but that's not a big deal right windows file paths alone have so much byzantine crap in them and it's ridiculous like they do mention dot nofollow in here they also mentioned dot vol which is another one of the magic strings that you can put in unix path but windows man drive letters yes naturally but there's also like backslash splash backslash backslash period backslash pipe syntax to get it like device nodes and stuff with special i i bet neither one of you has ever even heard of half of this stuff like and then they have to make an abstraction that works with these paths but also the same abstraction works with linux paths that also works with apple paths it is way more complicated than you think and it's like you know if you were ever trying to do something cross-platforming like thank god someone else wrote file path and i didn't have to but even just using it correctly is tricky so i would encourage you to check this out um and uh again maybe you'll learn something about uh the the special magic strings that you can put a file path on mac os that will have behaviors that you might find useful today i learned did you skim it and look at the the windows things i didn't know half of the stuff like i didn't know the one with the drive letter where it's c colon and then a backslash versus c colon without it like that both of those are still accepted by modern windows obviously there's the backslash backslash server slash share thing that you're familiar with but the backslash backslash period backslash pipe with name i had never heard that never seen that the nul all caps the the backslash backslash question mark backslash c colon backslash there's too many backslashes what are they doing over there like it makes me so happy not to be on windows like i know we've got these weird dot files in mac os but the windows one's just i'm so happy that's not an operating system that i ever have

1:54:15John Siracusa:to deal with yeah conventional uh drive letter forms unc forms uh current drive root and root list paths so that's that all makes sense i was familiar with all those drive namespace paths beginning with backslash backslash dot backslash followed by a win32 device name eg backslash backslash dot backslash pipe uh backslash backslash dot backslash com one backslash backslash dot backslash physical drive zero yikes didn't know that and then they have to make an abstraction over this like the file path thing has to have like accessor methods for like like they came up with names like what do we call it like yeah it's drive letter but what about when it's like backslash brush like server site like what is that part called like they have to come with like a you know a word for that part of the path that is the same word on windows linux and mac os this amazing pretty amazing work um for the people who created file path