5 small issues migrating from OSX to CINN-mint

[Timber2]

Hi,
As a Mac user for the last 17 years with an occasional foray into various linux flavors for running some home based servers I guess I'm used to doing things a certain way, as I am working now on Mint 17 cinn desktop for the last 3 weeks or so, I've come up with about 5 items I sure would like to find if there is a way to change them:

1) In OSX I can click on a file name, hit the return key and by default it highlights the file NAME so it can be edited easily and renamed, in Mint this opens the file instead, to rename it means several additional steps thru the menu, is there a way to change this?

2) In OSX everything opens by default in the center of the screen, in Mint it all defaults to the top left corner, I managed to set a key to center the window but it has to be done for every single window... I tried something I read about that would perform this function and installed it from the package manager, but it didn't work, neither does changing any of the settings preferences, any sure fire way to get all windows to open in the center of the screen automatically?

3) In OSX I can easily take a screen shot jpg or png of any area on the screen by hitting CMD/SHIFT/4 keys, the mouse arrow turns to a cross and I can select the area I want while holding the button down, and release, and the image is saved automatically to my desktop, in Mint I have to start up Kazam or Screenshot every time, and go through more steps to accomplish the same thing, then quit it, just not as efficient or easy, is there a better way in Mint other than Kazam/Screen shot to get a function similar to this?

4) Nemo for search, the OSX uses "Finder" and one of the things I like about "Finder" is it has file CREATION dates in one column, modified dates etc in other columns, the colums also stay the width they are initially set to, I noticed in Nemo the column widths change to very wide every time I open it, and there is no column or choice in it to show any file creation dates- something very handy when you have 20 years worth of archives.
I tried Krusader and it too doesn't seem to display a file creation date column.

5) File creation dates seem to be completely lost when transferring files over my LAN from OSX to my machine running Mint, every file shows the date of the transferred copy, in OSX if you copy a file to another drive it retains it's original creation date, is there some way to make it so this can happen in Mint when copying files to it?

I think that is all that I noticed that I would really like to solve, of the 5 items #5 and #4 are the top issues for me followed by #1, #2 and lastly #3 in order of importance.
Probably #5 and #4 are important enough for my daily user machine that if I can't find a workaround for them I will probably go back to OSX for my daily use and relegate the Mint box to a server.

Thanks for any ideas/help.

[austin.texas]

1) In OSX I can click on a file name, hit the return key and by default it highlights the file NAME so it can be edited easily and renamed, in Mint this opens the file instead, to rename it means several additional steps thru the menu, is there a way to change this?

Click on the file name, and hit F2 instead of return.

2) In OSX everything opens by default in the center of the screen, in Mint it all defaults to the top left corner, I managed to set a key to center the window but it has to be done for every single window... I tried something I read about that would perform this function and installed it from the package manager, but it didn't work, neither does changing any of the settings preferences, any sure fire way to get all windows to open in the center of the screen automatically?

Open Up a Window in Center -
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content ... dition.htm

3) In OSX I can easily take a screen shot jpg or png of any area on the screen by hitting CMD/SHIFT/4 keys, the mouse arrow turns to a cross and I can select the area I want while holding the button down, and release, and the image is saved automatically to my desktop, in Mint I have to start up Kazam or Screenshot every time, and go through more steps to accomplish the same thing, then quit it, just not as efficient or easy, is there a better way in Mint other than Kazam/Screen shot to get a function similar to this?

In Mint, the PrintScrn key takes a screenshot of the entire screen and Alt-PrintScrn takes a shot of the active window. You can set a "Keyboard shortcut" (maybe Ctrl-Alt-S) to open the Screenshot window:
Go to Menu > System Settings > Keyboard.
Under the "Keyboard shortcuts" tab, click the "Add custom shortcut" button.
Enter gnome-screenshot --interactive to the Command box, enter a Name, then click the Add button.
Click on the unassigned row (unassigned is then changed to New accelerator...).
Press a new key combination, e.g. Ctrl+Alt-S (New accelerator... is then changed to Ctrl+Alt-S). And the shortcut is ready for use. I don't know of any shorter method than that.

4) Nemo for search, the OSX uses "Finder" and one of the things I like about "Finder" is it has file CREATION dates in one column, modified dates etc in other columns, the colums also stay the width they are initially set to, I noticed in Nemo the column widths change to very wide every time I open it, and there is no column or choice in it to show any file creation dates- something very handy when you have 20 years worth of archives.

I don't know of any way to change the column widths persistantly. Adding more columns or decreasing the size of the window is about all you can do, as far as I know.
You can select columns including Date Modified and Date Accessed. There is no separate Creation Date.

5) File creation dates seem to be completely lost when transferring files over my LAN from OSX to my machine running Mint, every file shows the date of the transferred copy, in OSX if you copy a file to another drive it retains it's original creation date, is there some way to make it so this can happen in Mint when copying files to it?

No. The file formats are different.

The inode (index node) is a fundamental concept in the Linux and UNIX filesystem. Each object in the filesystem is represented by an inode. Every file under Linux (and UNIX) has following attributes:
=> File type (executable, block special etc)
=> Permissions (read, write etc)
=> Owner
=> Group
=> File Size
=> File access, change and modification time (remember UNIX or Linux never stores file creation time, this is favorite question asked in UNIX/Linux sys admin job interview)
=> File deletion time
=> Number of links (soft/hard)
=> Extended attribute such as append only or no one can delete file including root user (immutability)
=> Access Control List (ACLs)

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/understan ... nodes.html

[Timber2]

Hey Austin, thanks a lot for taking the time to address my questions very well! I'm sure both my questions and your answers will be of use to others as well!
I thought of one more minor difference that I've become so used to- I can drag and drop images off a web page or email to my desktop, when I tried this in Mint it only generated a hyperlink to the image, no big deal but also another function I use a lot every day.

I scrolled down the list and tried the F2 suggestion and it does nothing, (same for the screen shot using alt/prnt screen) I suspect because my KB is a MacAlly purchased for the Mac Pro, there is no prnt screen button and of course as an aside- being Mac directed the keys adjacent to the spacebar are the "command" keys which differ from the PC keyboards. I can probably do something with the key remapping you suggested, though I think I am going to run into some "issues" changing keys due to the fact I'm using Mac OSX as well as Mint on 2 different machines with 2 monitors on my desktop and a button switcher that switches the KB/mouse back and forth between the 2.

On the opening windows in the center, funny enough I found that page you refer to in a Google search a couple of weeks ago and did at the time install that gDevilsPie but I was unable to get that to start up, I think others had the same issue per the comments further down the page as I remember. I wasn't able to get that to work so I uninstalled it. I'm not sure why it didn't work.
The machine I'm using for this by the way- is a Dell Workstation TS5400 with 24 gb of ram

On the NEMO and the file creation date issues, I see what you are saying, so the file creation date function is more or less confined to Mac and Windows it would seem, that's a shame because it's a very useful feature of file management indexing and searching, I use that constantly when I need to locate specific files or content in my archives to be able to select a file based on when it was created.

The thing is, on the Mac I have the main drive for the OS and secondary drives for my file archives/contents, the secondary drives are set up with their entire free space as a .dmg and a 128 bit password, this is of course an OSX specific format, but one that I found very handy because I can quit the drive and simply click on the utilities and mount the drive(s) and it asks for the password to open the content, thereby it's more secure when unmounted.

I tried an alternate encryption software to perform this kind of function but it was ridiculously time consuming and awkward to use and took several more steps to do the same thing to mount and view.

I really like Mint but I'm feeling at this point that I'll have to re-examine how I use and manage my machines and content and make some decisions, at this point it looks like I will continue to use both OSX and Mint, but that I am probably going to return to OSX on a Hackintosh I am building- for my daily user machine, and use the Dell/Mint box for my OpenSIm server which uses mySQL extensively, this box has 24gb of ram which is perfect for that use and what I bought it for originally.

Thanks again Austin!