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Customizing Terminal behavior for documentation needs
As part of writing documentation today, I was given a script to follow when making some videos as part of the documentation process. The script included the following requirement:
- Prepare the Terminal to not show the hostname or the logged-in user
By default, Terminal in macOS Monterey will show both. How to get rid of this?
Fortunately for me, @scriptingosx had already documented how to do this as part of this post. You can use the PS1 environmental variable to set how your prompt appears in Terminal. After some experimentation, I set the following environmental variable:
PS1="\$ "
To have this prompt appear whenever I opened a new Terminal session, I added the following line to a newly-created .zshrc file in my home folder:
export PS1="\$ "
The .zshrc file is a configuration file for the zsh shell, so adding that and then opening a new Terminal window gave me a prompt which looks like this.
As part of making the videos, I also noticed that when I copied and pasted a command into the Terminal that the pasted text was highlighted automatically. I’d seen this before and ignored it, but I thought it might be an unnecessary distraction for those watching this video later, so I went looking for how to disable it.
After some research, I found that this was zsh’s “bracketed paste” feature, which was introduced as part of zsh 5.1. This feature can be turned off using the following command:
unset zle_bracketed_paste
Adding entries for both the prompt and turning off bracketed paste to my .zshrc file gave me the Terminal behavior I wanted:
export PS1="\$ " unset zle_bracketed_paste
I also performed additional customization of my Terminal experience, but those modifications were managed using a configuration profile. For more details on that, please see this previous post:
WWDC 2022 notes
This week, as in 2020 and 2021, I’m attending Apple’s WWDC 2022 conference from the comforts of home. As part of this, I’m taking notes during the labs and session videos. Due to wanting to stay on the right side of Apple’s NDA, I’ve been posting my notes to Apple’s developer forums rather than to here.
To make it easier for Mac admins to access them, I’ve set up a post in the forums where I’ve linking the various forum posts with my notes. It’s available via the link below:
WWDC 2021 notes
This week, like last year, I’m attending Apple’s WWDC 2021 conference from the comforts of home. As part of this, I’m taking notes during the labs and session videos. Due to wanting to stay on the right side of Apple’s NDA, I’ve been posting my notes to Apple’s developer forums rather than to here.
To make it easier for Mac admins to access them, I’ve set up a post in the forums where I’ve linking the various forum posts with my notes. It’s available via the link below:
Using VLC to convert a video to play at twice normal speed
As part of preparing for an upcoming talk, I’m working on a presentation which includes a video. As part of adding the video to my Keynote slides I thought that increasing the playback speed would help with the pacing of the talk but I didn’t see a way in Keynote to have that happen as part of the video’s playback without having to manually run the video.
After some research, I found a straightforward way to use the open-source VLC video tool to double the playback speed of a video and save the changes. For more details, please see below the jump.
Selectively removing the drop shadow from screenshots on macOS Big Sur
One of my personal preferences with macOS is removing the drop shadow from screenshots. On macOS Catalina and earlier, I was able to to turn off drop shadows on screenshots by running the following commands:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true killall SystemUIServer
This appears to not work on fresh installs of macOS Big Sur, though it appears to still work on Big Sur Macs who had the setting applied prior to upgrading to Big Sur. However, when using keyboard shortcuts to make screenshots, it looks like there’s a way to selectively add or remove the drop shadow at the time of making the screenshot. For more details, please see below the jump.
WWDC 2020 notes
This week, I’m attending Apple’s WWDC 2020 conference from the comforts of home. As part of this, I’m taking notes during the labs and session videos. Due to wanting to stay on the right side of Apple’s NDA, I’ve been posting my notes to Apple’s developer forums rather than to here.
To make it easier for Mac admins to access them, I’ve set up a post in the forums where I’ve linking the various forum posts with my notes. It’s available via the link below:
WWDC 2019 notes
This week, I’m out in San Jose, California as an attendee of Apple’s WWDC 2019 conference. As part of this, I’m taking notes during the labs and sessions. Due to wanting to stay on the right side of Apple’s NDA, I’ve been posting my notes to Apple’s developer forums rather than to here.
To make it easier for Mac admins to access them, I’ve set up a post in the forums where I’ve linking the various forum posts with my notes. It’s available via the link below:
Session videos now available from Penn State MacAdmins Conference 2018
The good folks at Penn State have begun posting the session videos from the Penn State MacAdmins Conference 2018. The sessions slides and currently-available videos are all accessible from the Penn State MacAdmins’ Resources page at the link below:
http://macadmins.psu.edu/conference/resources/
As all the session videos have been posted to YouTube , I’ve linked my Providing the best Mac experience possible from the Mac CoE team with ❤️ session here:
The Escaping the Tech Whisperer Trap session I co-hosted with Nikki Lewandowski is linked here:
Slides from the “Escaping the ‘Tech Whisperer’ Trap” session at Penn State MacAdmins 2018
For those who want a copy of the documentation talk given by myself and my colleague Nikki Lewandowski at the Penn State MacAdmins 2018 conference, here is a link to the slides in Keynote format.
Keynote slides: https://goo.gl/nHWg3Z
Session videos from JAMF Nation User Conference 2016 now available
Jamf has posted the session videos for from JAMF Nation User Conference 2016, including the video for my documentation session.
For those interested, all of the the JNUC 2016 session videos are available on YouTube. For convenience, I’ve linked my session here.
Der Flounder 
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