Jon's Five-Monitor Work-From-Home Desk Configuration: 2021 Edition

Although many folks are working remotely these days due to the Coronavirus pandemic, I've had longer than most to accumulate a nice desk configuration!  For the past seven years now, I've worked remotely full-time from my home in Michigan.

Here's my current desk setup:

My current primary computer, a 2019 16" MacBook Pro, is the screen on the far left.  Of the other four monitors, two are connected directly to the MacBook Pro via USB-C cables; the remaining two are connected to my OWC 13 Port Thunderbolt 3 Dock -- that's the component sitting on the desktop behind my keyboard.

Delta since 2018

I didn't purchase and assemble this setup overnight! Instead, I've been able to add a part every year or so, building it up over time. This current setup is a nice improvement over my 2018 desktop configuration:

The current setup replaces that smaller rightmost monitor with a new portrait orientation monitor; the remaining monitors are the same, just repositioned.

Application layout

One reason I've opted for this setup of multiple monitors, as opposed to a single ultra-large monitor -- in addition to having had the ability to slowly purchase and assemble the setup over a period of years  -- is that the multi-monitor setup lends itself really nicely to having a particular application always be placed at a particular location.

It is a really nice luxury to just be able to just look at a particular screen to get a view of a given application, instead of having to Cmd+Tab or otherwise search through multiple windows to find an application that I'm looking for. 

Here's how I typically have my applications arranged in this current setup:

Leftmost monitor

As mentioned above, this is the MacBook itself. I have it up on a stand, both to better match the vertical positions of my other monitors, and to get a little bit of desk real estate back to store some small items under the stand.

I typically have my (multi-tab) iTerm2 terminal window running on this monitor, as well as a music player in "mini" mode. 

I've been using the Mac App Store free app MiniPlay for the latter recently, and it's been working really nicely. In addition to being very similar in size and UI layout to my own "Schneider's Eleven" minimal skin for Windows Media Player that I previously used on a daily basis when I primarily developed on a Windows machine, it seamlessly supports both music player apps that I typically use, Music (formerly iTunes) and Spotify.

Left portrait-orientation monitor

This is where I view and write code! As I've blogged previously, I find it really productive to be able to view a long swath of code at once on the tall monitor.

 (An exception is when I'm pairing with someone over screen-sharing software, since most of my peers don't have a portrait-orientation monitor. In that case, I typically drag the IDE over to my primary monitor.)

Bottom landscape-orientation monitor

This is my "primary monitor". I keep the Mac's Dock on this monitor. I typically have my main web browser window open on this monitor. 

I'm currently composing this blog post on this monitor. 😁

Top landscape-orientation monitor

As mentioned in my 2018 post (and more visible in my 2018 image above), this monitor is mounted on a pole anchored to my desk via a WALI Extra Tall Monitor Desk Mount. 

Sometimes I've got nothing happening on this monitor -- when I'm sitting, I have to crane my neck just slightly to look up at it -- but when I need a place to put some secondary window like a database/SQL query window, a code diff, or just another browser window, it's another place I can do so without obscuring any of my other open apps!

Right portrait-orientation monitor

This is where I keep my communications windows. The bottom portion is dedicated to Slack while I'm at work. I use the top portion for other communications apps like Messages and WhatsApp.

Phone stand

The small, portrait-orientation "screen" in front of my MacBook is an iPhone 12. I finally caved and bought myself a new phone, replacing my venerable iPhone 6S. Despite the lamentable lack of headphone jack technology, I have been otherwise been enjoying the improved battery life and memory on the new device.

The phone's "stand" is a magnetic wireless charger from Choetech, which takes advantage of the new MagSafe technology in the 12. (The phone's position while on the stand doesn't actually obscure any of the area of the MacBook monitor behind it when I'm sitting at my desk, as it appears to do in this photo.)

The app that you can see running on the phone is my own free App Store app, Desktop Journey.  I developed it because I wanted my phone to be doing something useful while sitting and charging in its stand on my desk. I figured an at-a-glance "dashboard" view of the time, my next calendar event, my current Reminders app reminders, the weather, and occasional prompts to stand up and stretch or do a few reps of an exercise would be ideal. 

After failing to find such an app anywhere on the App Store, I decided to build it myself, and created Desktop Journey! It's a completely free and ad-free app (except for the weather functionality, to help cover my costs for the non-free weather API that I'm using to query global weather data), and collects no personal data. Free Desktop Journey download on the App Store.

Small top-left screen

The last remaining little screen, at the top-left, is a Raspberry Pi running Pi-Hole, a new addition to my home network, a Christmas gift from my wife Melissa this past winter. With my local high-speed Internet monopoly having started imposing a bandwidth cap -- which my family regularly bumps up against, just through normal everyday usage -- I'm happy to take advantage of the opportunity to save some bandwidth by declining to send outgoing telemetry and requests for ads from my local network.

Wallpaper

The image is of Peyto Lake at Banff National Park, which my family had the good fortune to be able to visit in 2019. Banff -- along with the other nearby national parks in Canada, Jasper and Yoho -- is the most beautiful place I've ever visited. I hope to be able to go back and visit again someday!

As MacOS still lacks built-in support for spanning an image across multiple monitors, I used the App Store paid app Multi Monitor Wallpaper to generate this wallpaper.

TimeSnapper for Mac is now available!

Since all the way back in 2008, during most of which Windows was my daily-use operating system for work and hobbies, I used, and was a big fan of, a utility called TimeSnapper.  Billing itself as "The Automatic Screenshot Journal", TimeSnapper quietly would run in the system tray of my Windows computer, taking a screenshot of whatever application I was actively using every few seconds.  TimeSnapper additionally came with a "Play Your Day Like a Movie" feature, where I could watch my entire day of work, or jump directly to the screenshot of any point in time of the day.

TimeSnapper saved me on multiple occasions where I would have otherwise lost work. A couple of examples of this:

• I'd been typing some long-form text into a form on a web page, only to have the browser crash and lose all of my work. Without TimeSnapper's most recent screenshot of my work-in-progress post, I'd have had to recreate the text from scratch, instead of simply having to retype it. (See my 2014 tweet about the incident!)
• I'd run into a problem with a program, where it displayed a particular error message in a dialog. A few minutes later, I wanted to Google the error to try to find a solution. I couldn't remember the exact text of the error in order to type it into Google... but TimeSnapper had captured an image of the error dialog, so there was no problem!

In early 2017, taking on an assignment with a new product at work, I switched to working on a Mac, making my primary daily-use operating system macOS instead of Windows.  One of the first things I did, naturally, was to look for macOS equivalents of the essential utilities that I had come to rely on for software development and other work on Windows.

Although I was able to find many useful equivalents for utilities such as clipboard history saving, I wasn't able to find anything like TimeSnapper. Seemingly at least once every week after switching to Mac, I'd run into some situation like the ones described above where I wished I could look back in time to retrieve some important piece of information that I know I had on screen a short time earlier, but was now lost.

Fast-forward to the present day, and I'm super excited to announce: The official release of TimeSnapper for Mac is now available!

Why am I able to announce this? Because, in partnership with the original developers of TimeSnapper for Windows, Leon Bambrick and Atli Björgvin Oddsson, I am the developer of TimeSnapper for Mac!

By late 2017, I was frustrated enough with not having TimeSnapper or a similar utility in my day-to-day work that I reached out to Leon, asking if there was any news around a Mac release of TimeSnapper. Leon replied that there was not; but after some conversation, he offered me the opportunity to develop it!

After a long journey, starting with me not even knowing whether making a macOS version of TimeSnapper would be at all possible -- for example, whether macOS even had operating system hooks allowing an application to perform screen captures -- TimeSnapper for Mac is now complete, and is available on Apple's Mac Store as of today!

Some of the major milestones in TimeSnapper for Mac's development, using Objective-C and Xcode, included:

• Getting a simple, UI-less program working which successfully managed to take and save to disk a screen capture of the Mac desktop.
• Making the program "wake up" at regular intervals to take screen shots -- and continue to do so even if the computer is put to sleep.
• The ability to pause, and later resume, the capture of screen shots on command.
• Adding an option to reduce screen shots in size and/or quality before saving them to disk -- and adding a Preferences window for the user to control these options, as well as the delay between screenshots and the image format (.jpg or .png).

• An option to capture just the foreground application window, the entire monitor where the application is running, or all monitors (on a multi-monitor system). Due to the way the relevant macOS hooks work, just successfully identifying the foreground-most window was surprisingly challenging, but after lots of effort and testing, TimeSnapper is able to get it right for almost all applications.
• Adding a "preview image" of a screen shot to the Preferences window with the selected size and quality options applied, as well as an estimate for how large the screen shot would be on disk with the selected options.
• Adding "auto cleanup" of old screen shots to save disk space, along with Preferences window options for the user to specify a maximum age of saved screen shots, and/or maximum disk utilization for all screen shots.
• An option to open a new Finder window, navigated to the folder where TimeSnapper saves its images.
• Getting TimeSnapper to optionally start automatically after reboots. (This functionality on Mac was almost shockingly difficult to implement relative to what I expected, requiring quite a bit of code along with a whole "sub-application".) 
• Getting TimeSnapper to appear as an icon and menu in the Mac's top Menu Bar, and to display its larger Dock icon only when one of its windows is open.
• An initial "Play Your Day Like a Movie" window, displaying one of the saved screen shots.
• Adding a timeline to the Play Your Day window, displaying a range of hours corresponding to the earliest and latest screenshot captured for a selected day, and a tick mark on the timeline for the time of every individual screenshot taken.
• Getting a mouse click -- and later, drag -- on the timeline to change the image display to the image taken nearest to the clicked time.
• Adding the eponymous ability for the window to play the selected day's screenshots like a movie, with playback controls for starting/pausing the playback and increasing or decreasing the playback speed.

• Handling local time changes properly, so that "going back in time" by carrying the Mac across a time zone boundary from east to west, or at the end of Daylight Saving Time, doesn't cause screen shots to appear out-of-order in the Play Your Day window, or to potentially overwrite one another.
• Lots more polish and bug squashing!

It's been a genuine pleasure over the past few months, in the later phases of development, to once again have had TimeSnapper running on my daily-use computer -- now, a Mac -- affording me the ability to easily peer back in time and see exactly what text or activity I previously had on my screen!

Check out TimeSnapper on the Mac App Store! If you like it, I'd love it if you'd leave a nice review, or just drop me a line (here in the comments, or find me on Twitter) and let me know what you think!

Throttling Skype bandwidth on macOS

I'm a full-time remote worker, with all of my teammates located together in the office. To help maintain close communication with my team, I have a "telepresence" Skype call with the office that's always on, so my teammates and I can see and talk to one another.

We're currently using Microsoft's Skype as our videoconferencing solution, as it is the only one I've found that (1) works reasonably reliably; (2) supports auto-answer (so I can activate the call without someone in the office needing to manually answer it every day); and (3) is free.

Unfortunately, as with many Americans -- particularly in localities where only a single company provides high-speed land-line Internet -- my Internet service provider recently started imposing a bandwidth cap on my monthly Internet usage. My cap is 1000 GB per month. Between my job, and my family's normal Internet usage, we've been either coming close to, or exceeding, that cap on a regular basis.

As one part of a strategy to try and keep my home's Internet usage under the cap, I looked into how much bandwidth that always-on Skype call was using. Using the Network tab of my macOS copy of Activity Monitor, it turns out that it was quite a bit: An average of around 350 KB per second (with peaks over 400 KB/sec).

Over the course of the typical 6 hours per day where my team (Pacific Time / GMT -8) and I (Eastern Time / GMT -5) are both online, that works out to about 7.5 GB per day; which in turn works out to about 150 GB over a 4-week period where I'm in the office 5 days per week.

Unfortunately, macOS 10.14 Mojave does not provide an out-of-the-box a way to limit the bandwidth used by a particular application.

Skype for Mac (version 8.39) itself also doesn't provide a quality slider or other rate limiter; it always appears to consume as much as it can.

Complicating matters, Skype 8 also doesn't specify or allow configuration of which specific TCP ports it uses, for possible QoS throttling at the router.  Per a page on the Skype support site, Skype might be using TCP ports anywhere in the range 1000 through 65000.

After a fair amount of research and dead ends, the working solution that I finally landed on was the free version of a software package named Murus, which provides a GUI wrapper around the Packet Filter firewall functionality that comes with macOS.

My Murus configuration is based on a very helpful post on the Murus forum by user "hany".  The variant of hany's instructions that I used is as follows:

1. Install Murus.
2. In the main Murus window, in the "Services Library" pane, add a new custom service named "Skype" (or whatever you like). 
3. In the Ports field, enter 10000:22465, and then on a new line, 22467:65000.  (I excluded port 22466 because per Slack Support, that port is used for Slack calls, and I wanted those to remain highest quality.)

4. Drag the new service to the "Managed Inbound Services" pane.
5. On your new Skype service, click the little speedometer-looking icon to bring up the Bandwidth dialog.
6. Set your desired values for the Upload Bandwidth and Download Bandwidth. I found that values of 768 Kb/second resulted in very usable (if slightly blurry) Skype calls.

7. Press Cmd-S (or select Firewall > Save Configuration from the top menu).
8. Click the Play icon button in the top toolbar of the Murus window to start limiting bandwidth. (Press the Stop icon button again later to turn the throttling off again.)
9. I have found that I sometimes need to quit and restart Skype to see the changes take effect, while observing the bandwidth usage in Activity Monitor.

This is admittedly a non-ideal, somewhat brute force solution, since it affects not only Skype, but any application running on the computer using TCP or UDP ports in the 10000+ range.

However, it has proven to be effective: With this Murus configuration running, Activity Monitor shows my incoming (download) Skype bandwidth dropped to around 80 KB/sec.

That works out to about 34.5 GB of usage over a typical 6-hour-day, 20-day work month -- a savings of some 115 GB over running with no throttling over the course of the month, representing an 12% or so usage reduction in my imposed 1000 GB/month cap.  Not incredible, but not terrible, either!

Thank you to the Murus team for the software; to "hany" for the posted on the Murus forum that helped me with this solution... and to my local ISP monopoly for the opportunity to undertake this interesting learning experience!

My Five-Monitor MacBook Pro Setup

I currently have my primary work development computer, a 2017 MacBook Pro (15", with Touchbar), set up with a total of five monitors: The MacBook's own display, plus four external monitors.

Five monitors? Isn't that just a bit ridiculous?

Although it may seem like overkill, I have found that this setup is really good for productivity.  I'm able to put my most-frequently-used windows each on their own monitor, which is great for avoiding time wasted switching different windows back and forth into the foreground.

It's also great for helping to minimize the situation of making a mental note of something in one window, switching to a different foreground window, and then doing something in that other window with the remembered information; I can just glance back and forth between multiple visible windows instead.

My typical window configuration with this setup:

• Second monitor from right: My primary monitor. Typically I've got a web browser here.
• Second monitor from left (portrait / vertical orientation): My code window. Typically my IDE / code editor (e.g. Visual Studio or RubyMine) goes here. Great for seeing tons of code at once! Also excellent for reviewing long documents, such as XSDs or other documentation.
• Leftmost monitor: Secondary browser or document window. I put terminal windows here. I also put my mini-mode iTunes music player in the corner.
• Rightmost monitor: Communication / chat. I typically have my team's Slack window open here.
• Top monitor: I keep a video conference window to my team's office in San Diego open here during the hours that they are working, so they can see and talk to me, and vice-versa!

What's the hardware?

Computer

MacBook Pro, 2017, 15".

As far as ports go, this computer has 4 USB-C ports, plus a 3.5mm headphone jack -- and that's it! Power, video, network -- everything is done through the USB-C ports.

I have the laptop sitting on a 3M LX500 Laptop Stand to align its screen a little better vertically with the other displays.  I like this stand because there's a nice empty space under the stand (which is the not the case with many stands), which is nice for a little extra physical storage space on the desk top.

USB-C to 17-port adapter

OWC 13 Port Thunderbolt 3 Dock.

This is the main device that allows me to connect so many devices to my MacBook, including two of the four external monitors, as well as to provide power to the MacBook, all through a single one of the MacBook's USB-C ports.

Primary external monitor (second from right) 

Dell U2312HM. 1920x1080 resolution.

Connected via: MacBook USB-C port → CableCreation brand USB-C to DVI adapter → DVI cable → Monitor DVI port

Portrait mode (vertical) monitor

Dell U2412M. 1920x1200 resolution. 

Connected via: OWC Thunderbolt Dock → BlueRigger brand Mini Displayport to DVI cable → Monitor DVI port  

The stand that comes with the monitor supports rotation, so it was very easy to get it set up in portrait mode.  

The bump to 1200 resolution in the narrow dimension (instead of 1080) is nice, as it gives the monitor a little extra horizontal room in portrait mode. 

Modern versions of MacOS and Windows both have excellent support for "rotating" the output for a given monitor to support portrait orientation -- I've successfully used this monitor in portrait orientation with both OS X and Windows.

Rightmost (tertiary, 4:3) monitor 

Dell E196FP. 1280x1024 resolution. 

Connected via: OWC Thunderbolt Dock → Agatha brand USB-C to VGA Cable → Monitor VGA port


I wouldn't actually recommend this specific model of monitor anymore, because it only supports a VGA cable connection! Newer connection types such as DVI, HDMI, or DisplayPort will generally provide a sharper screen image. However, even with just the VGA connection, in practice I don't notice any bothersome blurriness on this display.

Top monitor: Dell S2415H. 1920x1080 resolution with integrated speakers.

Connected via: MacBook USB-C port → Apple brand USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter → HDMI cable → Monitor HDMI port

Stand: WALI brand Extra Tall Universal Single LCD Monitor Fully Adjustable Desk Mount

How painful is docking / undocking?

It's not bad at all, actually; there are only 3 USB-C cables to plug or unplug when I connect or disconnect the MacBook laptop from the setup: The one USB-C cable for the OWC Thunderbolt Dock, plus the two additional monitor adapter dongles.

It's not quite as nice of an undock experience as when I used this same set of monitors and other devices with my Lenovo Windows laptop -- which involved unplugging just a single HDMI cable from the laptop itself, and removing the laptop from the physical dock -- but it's still very acceptable!

What's with all of the Dell brand monitors?

Experience has taught me that some non-Apple monitors just don't play nice with MacBooks. The typical symptom I've seen is that I'll connect a monitor to the MacBook, and simply nothing will happen: The Mac will act as though nothing new was connected. Even the System Preferences → Displays → (hold Option button) → Detect Displays feature wouldn't help.

I don't know of any reliable way to tell whether a particular non-Apple monitor is going to work with a Mac other than actually trying it.

I've had good luck with Dell monitors working with the MacBook, though, so my current plan is to continue going with the "Dell" strategy until something changes -- that is, until I run across a Dell monitor that doesn't work with the Mac!

So why the detailed write-up?

Actually getting this to work was the end result of a lot of trial and error.  I tried several times connecting these and other monitors to the MacBook in ways that resulted in things not working -- almost always manifesting itself as the MacBook acting as though one or more of the connected external monitors didn't actually exist at all, as I noted earlier.

Some specific things that I remember trying when I was getting this all set up that didn't work:

• Trying to connect more than two external monitors via the OWC Thunderbolt dock. I was only ever able to get a maximum of two external monitors working through that dock; any further number of monitors I tried just wouldn't work.
• Certain other adapter and cable brands. In particular, whereas the CableCreation brand USB-C to DVI adapter (which has only 3.5 stars on Amazon as of this writing) worked for me, a similar Belinda brand USB-C to DVI adapter did not work for me -- even though it specifically listed support for MacBook -- and I ended up returning it.
• In general, I had a lot better luck getting "non-handshaking" port types (DVI, VGA) to work than "handshaking" ports (HDMI, DisplayPort). I had several different failures trying to get the two primary Dell monitors, both of which support both DisplayPort and DVI connections, to work with the MacBook via their DisplayPort connections, before I did get them working via their DVI ports. (Both Dell monitors did work just fine with my Lenovo Windows laptop via either one of their ports.)

Hopefully this post will prove of some value to anyone who might be trying to get a similar multi-monitor MacBook setup working; or to me, in the event that I need to try and recreate this setup in the future!

Wallpaper shout-outs

OS X does not currently have native support for spanning a single image across multiple monitors as the desktop wallpaper (like Windows does). The great $3 solution that I used to create the spanned image of the Enterprise-D as shown in the photo above is the Multi Monitor Wallpaper app, available on the MacOS App Store.

Multi Monitor Wallpaper shows you an outline of your combined monitor layout, and allows you to stretch / zoom / reposition your selected image across the monitors. It then automatically handles cutting up the image and setting it as the background image for each monitor. I have no affiliation with the app; I'm just a fan!

As for the excellent high-resolution image of the Enterprise-D itself, unfortunately I'm not sure whom to credit. I grabbed the image over a year ago via a Google image search, and I can't find the same image now when I search. If anyone knows where this image is from, let me know, and I'll gladly provide credit!

 

Mac Impressions - The First 60 Minutes

What follows is something a little bit different: For your amusement, a somewhat steam-of-conciousness recounting of my first 60 minutes with a Mac Mini (purchased for the purpose of doing some on-the-side iOS development), from my background as a guy with 25+ years of DOS/Windows experience (dating back to doing BASIC development on an IBM PC my Dad brought home from work when I was 6 years old!) and some limited Unix/Linux experience, but no real Mac experience at all. Enjoy!

8:01 - Successfully booted up! Logitech mouse and "brand X" USB Windows keyboard (in use temporarily until next reboot, when I'll try my PS/2 IBM Model M keyboard with an adapter) appear to be working!

8:03 - Using Safari... the mouse scroll direction is backwards! I can't cope with that, Googling for a fix... okay, fixed it in System Preferences | Mouse.

8:06 - Some keyboard shortcuts use Win (Command)! Some still use Ctrl (Ctrl+Tab to switch browser tabs!) Confusing! A lot to learn!

8:11 - Keyboard document navigation is different!
- “Move one word at a time” now uses Alt (Option), not Ctrl!
- What’s the shortcut to jump to the beginning or end of a document?

8:14 - Middle-click doesn’t close tabs in Safari!
- Maybe I’ll switch to Firefox later. But going to stick out the “native experience” for now.
- Also, where are the favicons on the tabs? Hard to tell them apart.

8:17 - Ctrl+Tab doesn’t use MRU order in Safari!
- To be fair, no other browser gets this right either by default except Opera. Will be a deal-breaker though if it turns out that there’s no workaround, just like Chrome.

8:23 - Woah - Ctrl+LeftArrow takes me to some other desktop that shows a calendar and a calculator and some other stuff! (Hit that by accident trying to navigate within some text in an editor!)

8:27 - Looking through system preferences, Ctrl+UpArrow = Mission Control apparently! Seems like an interesting Alt+Tab (er, Cmd+Tab) alternative?

8:30 - Mouse button 4 (thumb button) doesn’t go Back in Safari! Is there a way to make that work?

8:32 - Some things are somewhat familiar from iPod Touch, e.g. Notifications Center and FaceTime.

8:35 - Safari seems bad at suppressing popup windows? Or maybe I’m just wandering into more “grey” parts of the Internet as I’m trying to look up things like keyboard shortcuts and haven’t learned yet which sites have good Mac info? But I've seen at least 2 spammy-looking popup windows show up in front of me so far.

8:37 - Thinking about security as I'm having to type in a couple of my passwords... How do I know that this Mac isn’t running a keylogger? What’s the equivalent of Ctrl+Shift+Esc on this thing? (Just tried that; it didn’t do anything, nor did Cmd+Shift+Esc, not that I really expected it to. Maybe a good old command-line ps -ef is the answer, like in Linux... will need to learn what's "normal" on this system and what's not.)

8:38 - Ok, so how do I open a Terminal window? Searching Google... Aha, Cmd+Space is kind of an analog to Win+R (or just the Win key as of Windows 7) on Windows. Then I can just type “terminal” and hit Enter.

8:41 - Where’s the filesystem explorer? I remember that it’s called “Finder” on Mac. Poking around... Ah, I see, it’s activated from the smiley mac face at the far left of the “applications bar” thingy at the bottom of the screen.

8:42 - The Close button is in the top-left of each window, not top-right. Is there an Alt+F4 (universal “close window” shortcut key) on this?

8:45 - Talking to my wife on her iPhone via “Messages!” Man, this thing works flawlessly, unlike any solution that I’ve tried on a PC to chat with her on her iPhone. User experience is just like my iPod Touch. Impressed, but at the same time disappointed at that lack of a good PC solution for me to use at work; real keys (PC) blow away virtual ones (iOS device) every time.

8:48 - The Home and End keys don’t work in the Messages message entry field, but they do work in other places like Google Docs running in Safari -- what’s that about? They don’t seem to work in the Safari address bar either?

8:50 - Thinking ahead to writing up all this as a blog post. Is there an equivalent to LiveWriter on Mac? I'll probably just use the Blogger web UI for starters.

8:52 - Oh, found by accident that Cmd+UpArrow/DownArrow is like Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End. Was trying to do that Ctrl+UpArrow thing to activate Mission Control to find out where my terminal window went. Don’t see it... I must have closed it. But now I also see that Cmd+LeftArrow/RightArrow act like Home and End.

8:56 - What’s Launchpad do... ah, seems reminiscent of the iOS desktop. *All* of the icons!

8:58 - No Menu key? Is there a “right-click” key on Mac to bring up spelling fixes when the caret is on a misspelled word, without reaching for the mouse?

9:00 - Typing in a Safari textarea field and typoed in “cusotmer” and Safari is showing a little popup with the suggested corrected spelling “customer” -- great! But how do I accept that correction without reaching for the mouse and clicking on it? Just pressing space bar like on iOS doesn’t seem to do the trick? I can’t seem to use the tab key to get to the little popup either? ... Ah, I need to hit DownArrow and then enter, ok.

...And there you have it, the highlights of my first 60 minutes as a Mac user! Maybe I'll come back to this topic and do a "Mac Impressions - The First 60 Days" and give some more in-depth impressions once I've gotten to spend some significant time with this new machine.

Finally, here's one bonus thought to leave you with:

10:40 - I must have hit "Home" and/or "End" at least 15-20 times as I was editing this post, and in the process discovered that those keys on a Mac apparently serve to scroll the viewport (but not the insertion point, thankfully) to the beginning or end of a long editable text area, respectively! The muscle memory from all those years of DOS and Windows is baked in pretty hard. It will be interesting to see how difficult it is to overcome that as I continue using this new Mac... at least *some* of the time already I'm remembering to use Cmd+Left/Right instead of Home/End, but it's far from 100% at this early stage!