OS X Lion comes with ruby 1.8.7-p249 installed, although it's compiled against libedit rather than libreadline. Whilst libedit is a mostly-compatible replacement for libreadline, I find there's a couple of settings I'm used to that don't work in libedit. (Like history-beginning-search-backward.)

As of Xcode 4.2 Apple have stopped bundling GCC with it, shipping only the (mostly) compatible llvm-gcc binary instead. The suggested fix is to install GCC using the osx-gcc-installer project. However, I wanted to build and install it from source, which apple provides at http://opensource.apple.com/.

If you've not heard of it, MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks. Basically means you write in Ruby using Objective-C frameworks, and vice versa. It's pretty damn cool to be honest!

Google Groups is a pile of fail and hasn't posted my message in reply to a thread on Geekup so I'm blogging it instead.

Here are some mac tips I know and consider "basic" mac knowledge, but no-one else seems to know.