I've been using my new M1 MacBook Air for a few days now. Having NEVER used MacOS before, here are my first impressions.
@kev If you don't mind a little bit of lua scripting, there is hammerspoon which is something you should definitely get. There are a few window manager-like scripts that people have made that may or may not help you with that. I was very surprised how powerful it is.
For example, I'm used to my screen reader playing beep sounds based on the indentation level of the current line under the cursor. The Mac screen reader, VoiceOver, doesn't do this at all. But thanks to Hammerspoon this is now possible.
As for moving the dock to the top of the screen, this should probably still work. Open a terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Dock orientation top
It might not, but it's worth a try. Just kill the dock process, or log out and back in, and it should move it if this wasn't broken recently.
@talon @kev I've looked at karabiner, but there's no way to just import standard Unix compose keys
you have to define them all by yourself
actually maybe I'll just have to automate the conversion!
and yeah, you can enter accented characters by long-pressing the key
the problem is that this doesn't work everywhere and where it does work, it takes about seven times as long as using a compose key would
@redeagle @talon @kev i have discovered that keyboard view, but it doesn't have all the keys i usually use
keep in mind that i speak and write three languages. but I use the English keyboard as base, because it's most convenient for programming.
so English QWERTY keyboard + compose key has turned out to be the best combination for me, and I've used it for a good eight years now
@meena @kev yeah, I don't bother with holding the key down. I just use the option key thing. It works much faster.