Handy OS X Customizations

As much as I like OS X, there are still a few default behaviors that annoy me.  The following script has some of the customizations I apply to the Macs I use.  Just run any/all of these commands from the terminal. Just remember to perform the last step of relaunching the dock and/or finder to apply the changes. Enjoy!

#Enable paths in finder window titles
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

#Dock customizations... (Use the special 'suck' effect on minimize, pin 
#the dock to the top left corner of the screen)
defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect -string suck
defaults write com.apple.Dock pinning start
defaults write com.apple.Dock orientation left

#Enable widgets to be pulled out of the dashboard to the desktop
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

#Default to fully expanded save/open dialog
defaults write -g NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool YES

#Relaunch appropriate system stuff
killall Dock
killall Finder

OS X SVN Client

Lately, I have been searching for the best SVN client to use on OS X. I still have not found any solution that I am as happy with as I am with Tortoise over in Windows land. However, I have found that using a combination of a couple of free tools can get reasonably close. The first tool I use is the open source svnx application. Svnx provides graphical access to most of the SVN functions I use. The second tool is scplugin from the same group that develops tortoise. It provides the same handy ‘badges’ on the file icons to show SVN statuses in the finder, additionally it provides right-click access to many functions. These two programs combined give me everything I want with one exception… a really nice repository browser for moving and copying files. Hope this is useful to someone, and if you have any suggestions leave me a comment or send me a message. I’d like to hear about any other tools that might work better.