Monthly Archives: September 2014

Installing Agda in OS X 10.9

I recently set up Agda on OS X 10.9, and noticed that there was a very minor difference in step 3, as compared to the description on the official page on installing Agda on OSX. The steps are as follows:

1) Install the Haskell Platform

2) Type “cabal update” in the terminal

3) Update the PATH variable in the file .bash_profile, which is to be found in your home directory. If not, create it. Editing .profile had no effect on my OS X installation. Paste this line into bash_profile:

export PATH="$HOME/Library/Haskell/bin:$PATH"

4) Type “cabal install Agda” in the terminal

5) Install Aquamacs

6) Type “agda-mode setup” in the terminal. Note that this step will fail if you didn’t add Haskell to your PATH in .bash_profile.

7) Restart Aquamacs

Now load an .agda file to ensure that the menu ‘Agda’ appears in the menu bar of Aquamacs. Afterwards, you can proceed installing the Agda standard library.

Showing hidden files in Finder in Apple OS X 10.9

One of the minor annoyances with Apple OS X is that there is no convenient way to display hidden files in Finder. As I recently noticed, after an upgrade to OS X Mavericks (10.9), there was a slight change in the command. What used to work in 10.5 to 10.8 no longer has any effect in 10.9. You don’t even get an error message.

The correct command to show hidden files in the Finder in 10.9 is the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true
killall Finder

To undo those changes, just invert the value of the parameter ‘boolean’:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false
killall Finder

This is mainly a note for myself, which I wrote up because one of the first hits in Google on that issue leads to an SEO-optimised blog post that falsely claims that the same method works from 10.5 to 10.10.