Re: osx usability for a windows/linux user

In article <a9hjg39em99efpdn3phittk4jfotq806jk@xxxxxxx>, xen
<xen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 7 Oct 2007 13:41:05 +0000 (UTC), Dave Seaman
<dseaman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't know where you got that idea. The purpose of a Terminal window
is to run a Unix command (usually a shell, but it can be anything you
like). Each terminal window represents an independent process. I
typically have six or more terminal windows open at once, and about half
of them are running ssh sessions on various remote hosts.

But then how is the single-app-instance strategy implemented? Do apps
need to check for running instances themselves, if they want to adhere
to this principle? Or will the GUI bark if you register an app with
the Dock when an app with the same name is already registered?

What do you mean by "register"? The GUI does keep you from adding two
copies of any given item to the Dock, if that's what you mean.

Terminal is an application. It can have multiple windows, like most
applications. Each window contains a separate shell process. That's
separate from the issue at hand.

Applications don't need to check for already-running instances of
themselves. When you tell a Mac to open an application (from the
Finder, from the Dock, or using the "open" shell command) the Mac will
just bring it to the front if it's already running. You might be able
to get two instances running if you found the actual executable for an
app and directly executed it in the shell, but you'd rarely do that.
I've certainly never tried.

(On Macs, the application icon you see in the Finder is typically not
the actual executable; it's a "package," essentially a special folder
that is shown as if it were just a regular item rather than a
container. The actual executable is somewhere inside. As a user, you
basically never have to deal directly with it, although you can if you
like -- there's a context menu item, "Show Package Contents," that
opens it like a folder.)

--
Jerry Kindall, Seattle, WA <http://www.jerrykindall.com/>

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