Mac Files: Darwin and Ruby Rails

Today I am installing Ruby Rails on the MacBook, with a little help from MacZealots. I've been playing around with Darwin, which is the Mac flavor of Unix, which in turn descended from FreeBSD. I'm excited about this deeper dimension of MacOSX -- it's like having a new world to explore.

This new world is accessible through Terminal (Windows equivalent: DOS Command prompt). Being descended from Unix, there are lots of Darwin features that I like. For instance, to copy text from the screen, all you need to do is highlight and press Apple-C. In DOS, you still have to right-click the title bar and then choose Edit > Copy. It's surprising that a task as common as copy-pasting from command lines should not have a quicker shortcut for Windows.

More than that, Terminal has more goodies than Windows. It comes pre-installed with Apache, and it has more powerful commands, all Unix-derived. It's also got the famous man pages. In DOS, all you get is terse one-line help text. Man pages are more comprehensive.

Oops. Ruby is done installing. I'll get back to the blog, later.