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Lost in OS X

I had a partner once who claimed that he had a "mental map of the universe" in his head. His ability to avoid getting lost may have been slightly better than mine; some of us get turned around and confused more often than others. On the highways, that means I'm sometimes wasting expensive gasoline (yes, yes, I know I could buy a GPS mapping system) but on my computer it's either a window, a file or my mouse that I have lost track of.

It took me quite a while to understand why I lose my mouse. I have no idea if this is a feature or bug in all iBooks, but if I move to the left or top of my screen, the mouse cursur stops at the edge and remains visible. If I move to the right hand edge, I can move most of the cursor off the screen: a tiny tip remains visible on the lower part, but it's easy to miss unless you look closely and doesn't exist at all on the upper part. If I move to the bottom edge, the entire cursor also disappears. With the cursor off screen, downward or rightward movement does nothing; I need to move left or up to recover the cursor.

Well, that hardly qualifies as "lost". That's more like thinking you saw something out of the corner of your eye but it wasn't really there: your error is corrected almost immediately. Losing a file is a little more serious. Fortunately Mac OS X has a number of ways to help. For graphical users, there's "Find" in the Finder: not only does it find files for you, but it sorts them into categories, helpfully showing you Folders, Images, Source Code, HTML files and so on.

(An odd case of "lost" is determining what the actual file is when you are looking at something in a Finder window or the Dock. Command-click in the window title to show the path, command-click on a Dock icon opens a Finder window at that item's location. Command-I on a file opens up the Get Info window, which also shows the file path. )

"Find" is a bit slow, though, so I'm more apt to drop to the command line and there I really have choices and control.

First, there's "locate". This works like the graphical Find in that you can use part of the file name, but it doesn't organize into categories:

$ locate footer
/Applications/AbiWord.app/Contents/Resources/tb_edit_editfooter.png
/Applications/AbiWord.app/Contents/Resources/tb_edit_removefooter.png
/Applications/BBEdit.app/Contents/Resources/Default Support Folder/HTML Templates/footer.incl
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/howto/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/misc/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/mod/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/programs/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/vhosts/footer.html
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/es/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/fr/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/it/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/ru/includes/footer.inc
/usr/share/automake-1.6/am/footer.am
/usr/share/swat/include/footer.html
 

I've noticed that many people who use locate don't realize that it can use (escaped) wild cards:

$ locate '*/footer*'
/Applications/BBEdit.app/Contents/Resources/Default Support Folder/HTML Templates/footer.incl
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/howto/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/misc/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/mod/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/programs/footer.html
/Library/Documentation/Services/apache/vhosts/footer.html
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/es/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/fr/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/it/includes/footer.inc
/Users/apl/darwinports/www/ru/includes/footer.inc
/usr/share/automake-1.6/am/footer.am
/usr/share/swat/include/footer.html
 

Notice that I had to be explicit about "*/" before the file name I actually wanted: locate 'footer*" wouldn't have found anything.

I'm much more apt to use command line "find", which lets me specify a starting directory (useful when I know it's somewhere "under" where I am now) and its wildcards relate to the file name and not to directory paths:

$ locate "*/z"
/sw/share/terminfo/z
/Users/apl/pcunix/z
/Users/apl/Tony/patches/web/Tests/z
/Users/apl/Web/Tests/LINUX/z
/Users/apl/Web/Tests/z
/Users/apl/z
$ find . -name z
./pcunix/z/
./Tony/patches/web/Tests/z
./Web/Tests/LINUX/z
./Web/Tests/z
./z

The "find" can take much longer to run, but locate has another disadvantage: it's index has to be updated by a cron job, so it will not find new files if they were created after the update last ran..

If I know that what I want is in $PATH, bash's "which" is nearly instant:

$ which now
/Users/apl/bin/now
$ which sync
/bin/sync
 

OS X's Spotlight and command line mdfind can be used to find files if you know something about what they contain, though again I'm much more apt to use a recursive grep.

It's lost windows that give me the most trouble. There are several shortcuts that help. If it's a specific application, for example you are using Safari or Firefox and have a lot of windows open, F10 tiles them all in one window; click on the one you want. I'm always losing Terminal windows, and F10 helps me find them. If you just want to switch applications, ALT-TAB cycles through your open programs, but sometimes I lose track of where something is at all. In that case, Expose's F9 rescues me: that displays all windows in a miniaturized tiled view. That view lets me find the window I though I had opened in Safari but that actually is in Firefox. It is also handy for finding a warning or error window that I wanted to temporarily ignore.

Until I open my wallet and buy that GPS unit, none of this helps me find my way on the road. We've recently moved, so even finding my way home can sometimes be interesting. It's good that my Mac has so many ways to find the things I lose on it.

3 comments

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Mon Feb 13 14:59:59 2006:   Gary


I used to simple drag those important windows to the bottom of the screen, and they never got lost. Although setting the rollball on the mighty mouse as App expose and the press as 'all' expose has improved this a lot.

When I loose my mouse, I find this works:
Locate wire at back of computer.
Follow it until reaching pile of paper and books
move them on top of other crucial object
use mouse.
:-)

Doesn't work with a wireless unfortunately!



Mon Feb 13 15:03:09 2006:   TonyLawrence


The bottom of my screen is messier than your desk..



Tue Feb 14 06:05:08 2006:   Gary


My desk is so messy is covers the bottom of my screen!

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