Hi John, I’ll answer a few of your questions I have experience with, and leave the rest to others.
The OS X Terminal is not the best experience. At times it has been better, and at others it has been worse, but it always seems to be perpetually broken. It’s better than nothing, but nothing like the smooth experience it is under Linux or Windows, for some infuriating reason or another. I suggest you keep one or both on hand, as VMs. This is the best approach to get full coverage. Same with code indenting. There’s a script, but you must invoke it each time with a keypress. I’m not a fan of Python at all, but this might just be a problem for you. You can indeed partition an external disk so it contains both a bootable system and another volume for storage or backup. And it can be any disk at all. The firmware boot picker isn’t accessible, but in practice you can make a very good guess, and get it right more often than not. There’s also the bless command-line tool (once System Integrity Protection is turned off) by which means one can set the variables from the Terminal. I can’t think of any other situation one would be disadvantaged in, except for the Internet Recovery using Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, you will need Ethernet (including Apple’s own adaptors) if it comes to that. It would be a good idea to keep a USB drive around with Apple’s recovery image on it, in times of need. Neither trackpad nor numpad are necessary, but both are helpful. I have a trackpad and keyboard set up, with the keyboard having no numpad. I have in the past found the numpad handy, and the trackpad handy but in fewer situations because it’s still more work to use it, and isn’t really quite as flexible as using a touchscreen on iOS. Finally, if you can get a Mac Mini 2012 with decent specs, and in particular a quad-core chip, you ought to. If you cannot, then the current gen Mac Mini is in most respects an improvement, despite the lack of quad-core options. Cheers, Sabahattin -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
