Quick Python/Developer tips for OSX Lion

Yes; of course I upgraded to OSX Lion on day one. To quote myself from twitter:

I am happy in the warm cozi­ness and stark white­ness of Steve Jobs’ monoculture.

Regard­less of that though, I had very few hic­cups with Lion itself — but a few things you need to deal with going in:

• Be on a high band­width con­nec­tion. The down­loads you have to make are huge.
• XCode 4.x is now free in the App Store — you need this — the first thing you need to install after Lion is the lat­est ver­sion of XCode from the App Store, if you do this, all your vir­tualenvs, your home­brew envi­ron­ment (at least mine) just Keep Work­ing. Save your­self some pain.
  • Side note: @kennethreitz, gen­tle­man scholar, has actu­ally done a cus­tom osx-gcc-installer — this con­tains a sys­tem install of GCC and all the good­ness you need (such as install_name_tool) for Python hack­ing. So you might be able to skip the mas­sive XCode install.
  • When installing XCode, for some unknown unholy rea­son, if you have not quit itunes, and itunes helper (see activ­ity mon­i­tor) prior to start­ing the XCode installer, the install will hang. Do your­self a favor and kill it with fire.
  • Remem­ber; the binary direc­tory for the dev tools is in /Developer/usr/bin/ — this includes gcc-4.2
  • Do your­self a favor, drop “export ARCHFLAGS=”-arch x86_64”” into your .bash_profile.
• If you’re run­ning home­brew; after the upgrade, I rec­om­mend a brew update && brew upgrade
• If you use mer­cu­r­ial — you need to install the updated ver­sion found here.
• Just for good mea­sure, do a global (sudo) rein­stall of vir­tualenv; vir­tualen­vwrap­per and pip. Make sure they’re pointed at the write default Python (in my case the sys­tem one).
• If you are using VMWare Fusion: You really need to be run­ning the lat­est ver­sion of 3.x.

Other than the above; my dev envi­ron­ment pretty much just kept rock­ing — Lion’s default Python install is a healthy Python 2.7.1 — dou­ble nice++ — MacVim, edi­tor of choice just kept plug­ging away, although I have not tried the “offi­cial unre­leased” ver­sion they have for Lion. I have a slight aver­sion to run­ning beta builds of my editor.

Some of you are going to run into some annoy­ances; I can’t help you with all of them, but I can help you with the two inter­face changes I could not deal with (I actu­ally like all the other ones).

• First; go into sys­tem pref­er­ences > mis­sion con­trol and uncheck “Auto­mat­i­cally rearrange spaces based on most recent use” — trust me, you’ll thank me.
• Sec­ond, there’s this … annoy­ing ani­ma­tion when you make new appli­ca­tion win­dows (See the Ars Lion Review | kin­dle ver­sion). The ani­ma­tion offends me on a cel­lu­lar level. You dis­able it by run­ning: “defaults write NSGlob­al­Do­main NSAuto­mat­icWin­dowAn­i­ma­tion­sEn­abled –bool NO” on the com­mand line.
• Show hid­den files in finder: “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAll­Files –bool YES”
• Show full paths in finder: “defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle –bool YES”

Other than that; I’m a happy camper. The new scroll behav­ior on the track­pads is amaz­ing, if not jar­ring when using a mouse. Every­thing just pretty much kept work­ing for me. But then again, I’m pretty easy to please.

See also — “Four Lion Ter­mi­nal Hacks” from Mac­world and “Top 10 Secret Fea­tures in OSX Lion” from Life­hacker — if you really, really hate the UI changes, see “How to de-IOSify” from Lifehacker.

p.s. I orig­i­nally for­got to men­tion this — but the full disk encryp­tion in Lion is imple­mented damn well — it’s easy for users to “get” — seam­less, and trans­par­ent. In my hon­est opin­ion, this is worth the price of upgrad­ing alone if you have a lap­top. It’s so well done, and it sim­ply shows how crappy fil­e­vault was — it also goes to show that if you make crypto easy and trans­par­ent for users, they might actu­ally use it. See the Ars Review for a deeper dive. See also “PGP WDE vs. Lion Disk Encryp­tion”

Yes; of course I upgraded to OSX Lion on day one. To quote myself from twitter:

Be on a …