Mac utilities

Time Machine

Time Machine is a great backup utility, but it's not perfect. One of the drawbacks is that - from the GUI - it's not easy to create complex exclusions from the backup.

Since I do a lot of Python development, I don't want to back up virtual environments, etc. To exclude these, you can use find to search for the directories and pipe them to tmutil, e.g.,

find `pwd` -maxdepth 3 -type d -name '.venv' | xargs -n 1 tmutil addexclusion

to exclude the .venv directory.

There's also a tmignore tool to automatically exclude files from your .gitignore, but that doesn't appear to be maintained anymore.

System sounds

I don't like some of the system sound effects in Big Sur. I've uploaded Basso and Glass from Catalina. To use them as system sounds, do

mkdir ~/Library/Sounds
cp Basso_Catalina.aiff Glass_Catalina.aiff ~/Library/Sounds/

Then, in System Preferences Sound, they should be available.

Configuration options

• Enable 3-finger drag on the trackpad
  • Go to System Preferences Accessibility Pointer Control
  • Under Mouse & Trackpad Trackpad Options... select three finger drag from the dropdown menu and tick the checkbox
• Order everything in every directory within Finder alphabetically
  • In the menu bar in Finder, go to View Show View Options
  • Ensure Group By and Sort By have the value Name and click Use As Defaults

Useful shortcuts

• Forward delete: fn + ⌫
• Show inspector (so Get Info shows for active file): ⌘ + ⌥ + i
• Toggle to show/hide hidden files and directories (i.e., prefixed with .): ⌘ + ⇧ + .