In a previous post I wrote about the Fink package manager. MacPorts is another popular tool for installing and managing open source software on Mac OS X. There are a number of overlaps with the two packages, however, they are not one in the same.

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There are times when the default unix tools installed on Mac OS X fall short. For instance, wget which is used to download files over the web using http, https, and ftp, is not available “out-of-the-box.”

Fink is one of several package managers available for Mac OS X that make it easy to download and install any number of software applications/tools.
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If you are ever in need of a simple (free) clipboard manager, I recommend you check out Jumpcut. This application works quietly in the background, saving each text copy into an internal buffer. When you want to paste information, click the icon on the menu bar and you’ll see a list of recently copied text, choose the one you like and you’re good to go…

Having the ability to copy/paste multiple lines of code, from multiple source files, has come in handy many times.

In the image below you can see the menu bar icon for Jumpcut, along with a list showing my four most recent entries copied into the clipboard.

One other really nice thing about Jumpcut is that it’s open source. If you are looking to learn about Cocoa development, specifically one which pokes around with some interesting system stuff, give Jumpcut a look.

For those who are new to working with Unix, I want to take a moment to introduce aliases. The simplest means to think of an alias is as a text shortcut, used inside a Terminal window, to represent one or more commands. On second thought, maybe that isn’t the simplest means to describe an alias. Let me try again using an example…

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