I spent basically the entire day (beyond hanging out with tekk & twelfth) debugging why the hell headers wouldn't show up when using macports, basically trying to install anything that used C headers at all. Ruby didn't work, nothing. I even installed an older version of Xcode thinking that 4.6.3 was buggy, so I'm on 4.6.0 now, but it doesn't really matter because that wasn't the problem. The internet was completely useless (who knew no one would have come accross this issue on a 13 year old OS on a 19 year old laptop in the year 2026...)
Eventually, despite Xcode telling me command line tools was installed, I went on the apple developer downloads site and downloaded Xcode command line tools separately. You can't install them from Xcode itself because they don't maintain that infrastructure, but Apple DOES still have a lot of their old software available for free and fairly accessible (if you have an apple developer account, doesn't have to be paid).
Anyway, installing the command line tools separately fixed it. So if anyone else runs into that problem, you just have to download Xcode first and then command line tools. They're from the same website (which is the official Apple site anyway) so you can save yourself a lot of trouble.
I have configured vim with a few plugins to save myself some headache too, and a color scheme, and altogether that wasn't too hard. I even installed CoVim but that required downloading Vim via macports with +python27. I also did +ruby for the sake of random plugins I might want to install later. :)
A useful plugin I found is vim-preview by greyblake which lets me hit a hotkey to preview my websites. It doesn't matter too much for this site but if I want to do any css it'll be helpful for sure, though I still can't get vim to believe me that I have the redcarpet gem installed so I can preview Markdown. Whatever, not the end of the world, I can usually guess what Markdown will look like.
My full vim config (setup today) is as follows:
syntax on
colorscheme molokai
set number
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set softtabstop=4
set expandtab
set ignorecase
set smartcase
set hlsearch
set incsearch
set mouse=a
call plug#begin()
" List your plugins here
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Plug 'tpope/vim-markdown'
Plug 'hdima/python-syntax'
Plug 'hail2u/vim-css3-syntax'
Plug 'ap/vim-css-color'
Plug 'fatih/vim-go', { 'do': ':GoUpdateBinaries' }
Plug 'FredKSchott/CoVim'
Plug 'greyblake/vim-preview'
call plug#end()
I have yet to test out vim-fugitive, so I'm not sure if it'll work with my setup. Everything else seems to work just fine though. Pale Moon browser has been CHUGGING though because every damn site has to load a shit ton of data, so websites that lag a little bit on even my phone just freeze the browser for a few minutes. Luckily I installed ublock origin so I'm not being killed to death slowly by ads.
Another issue I've come across is just file transfer -- some things I need on the macbook are difficult to download directly from the browser. Luckily I have a few fileservers and have also learned how to set up my other PCs as ftp servers, and I've been able to get everything I needed despite a few hiccups before now with git clone ssh:// and the browser. I travel a lot tomorrow, so we'll see how and if this thing can entertain me on the plane for a bit.
selkie 07/05/2026