Far Manager Tips

Resolving keyboard conflicts on a Mac.

On a Macintosh such essential keys as F9, F10, F11 and F12 are used as Exposé, Show Desktop and Dashboard shortcuts. In Terminal we can use Command-F9, Command-F10 and so on to simulate F9, F10 etc. respectivelly.
But in CrossOver Command acts as Alt! So, Command-F10 will be understood by FAR as Alt-F10, Panel tree shortcut instead of Quit command. I've just unbinded all the Exposé and Dashboard shortcuts in System Preferences > Dashboard and Exposé.
In my configuration Exposé was reassigned to mouse wheel click, Application Exposé to the fifth mouse button click, Show Desktop to a screen corner and Dashboard to F13.
BTW, doing Exposé with mouse buttons is very cool.
You are free to choose any other preference. These actions can be binded to Command-, Shift-, Control-, Option- functional keys thus resolving this conflict.

Another way is to assign another key in FAR instead of Mac OS X environment. You should temporarily unbind this key and record a macro. Recording a macro is described in FAR documentation. This method is a hard one. First, macro must be recorded in multiple places : Editor, Viewer, Dialogs, etc. And second, some plugins are configured in a way that involves these keys by default. You might be necessitated to edit each macro .reg file involving these keys.

Next, the Insert key. Very essential one. Corresponds to the Help key on a Mac keyboard. But in CrossOver pressing Help does not produce Insert keystroke. And Command-Help too. Some Macs do not have Help key at all.

But we need to mark files somehow. Well, we can use NumPad zero key instead. If it's convenient for you than just skip this step.

Good alternative is to use Space instead of Insert. You can use a standard macro shipped with FAR. Open regedit (you can launch it from the FAR command line) and import Program Files/Far/Addons/Macros/Space.reg. Then restart FAR Manager and you're done.

Adjusting wineconsole.

If you had never ran wineconsole yet, it seem to be adjusted improperly. You can access its settings by right-clicking any wineconsole window including FAR window. There will be three options : Edit menu, Default preferences and current Preferences. Adjust both.

In FAR this popup should be set to Shift-Right Click.
My font was set to Lucida Console, 14 in both places.
And... Settings!
Far : Buffer and Window are both 100x45, and console closes automatically.
Default : Buffer is 100x300 and Window is 100x45 and console doesn't close automatically.

Of course, it is not the only way to set up a convenient environment.
Default wineconsole settings are not acceptable IMHO.