Here’s a great reason why I love my Mac as much as I do:
I am doing a bunch of data conversion from one MySQL database into another. I execute a long query, copy the results and paste it into an excel window. I go back to execute another query and accidentally paste when I don’t mean to. Since I had the long results of the previous query in the clipboard, my Terminal gets confused and I am greeted with the spinning ball that means nothing other than bad news. I sit there and patiently wait for the ball to stop because force quitting Terminal (which is running several other crucial processes in different windows) is not an option.
After a few seconds, as my panic level increases, I remember that I installed another terminal application a month ago. I start up iTerm, execute a “ps -auxwww | grep mysql” and find the hung window. I “kill -9” the process and my spinning ball goes bye-bye. The Mac dumps the clipboard contents into the shell window and complains about commands that make no sense but my machine is back, my terminals are still running their processes happily and I lost nothing. Not even a tiny bit of work.
How can you not love a machine that lets you save your own ass?
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