devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

The default Eclipse for Mac OS X font is kind of annoying since it’s way too big and reminds me of MS Comic Sans. If you try to replace it with one of the wonderful ProggyFonts without tweaking them first, you get stuck with anti-aliased fonts that look terrible. During my quest to get past this problem, I came across a way to setup a more programming friendly font in Mac OS X which uses one of the Proggy Fonts in aliased mode.

Although the above instructions aren’t terribly explicit, you can find the various Eclipse font settings under Eclipse > Preferences > General > Apperance > Colors and Fonts once you’ve installed the font and made the appropriate changes to your System Preferences.

I’m in the process of setting-up a new Apple MacBook Pro today, and during the process of trying to import and get some old SSH keys working correctly I accidently changed the permissions on my home directory. Even after scrolling back through the commands I used I’m still not even sure how it happened, but nonetheless I had to find a way to fix it.

Anyhow there are several symptoms you’ll see if the permissions are wrong in your user folder such as:

• If you’re browsing to your home folder using Finder and get a message like ‘The folder “username” could not be opened because you do not have sufficent access privileges’
• When trying to access your home folder in a terminal, you keep getting redirected back to /

Basically if you can’t access your home directory in Mac OS X, this blog entry is for you. There is a “repair permissions” utility in OS X but it does not repair permissions for user directories, so you have to take care of it manually.

To repair a specific users permissions in Apple OS X, type the following command in a terminal and replace “username” in the command below with the name of the users permissions you need to fix:

[code]
$ sudo chmod -R ug+rwX /Users/username
[/code]

You’ll need to reboot so that Finder will pick-up the permission changes, but that should clear-up any user specific permission problems if you are locked out of your home directory.