So, I ordered a Macbook Air M1 yesterday..

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I only ordered the bog-standard, lowest spec edition. I doubt I'll need anything more powerful than that, after all the current Windows Laptop I have is a 2.7ghz i7, with 8gb ram, onboard gfx, 256gb SSD and not really much of anything else.
.. And a shit screen that has a viewing angle of roughly 2 degrees.

This will be my first time at using a Mac "Full time", since I'll be putting my Windows laptop down and concentrating on solely using that.
Previous to this I was occasionally (read : Rarely!) using a MacMini, but as I've stated quite a few times, ever since my original surgery back in 2012, I've found it oddly difficult to sit at a desk and use a computer.
I've been Laptop 100% ever since, so never really had time to get to grips with MacOS.

In the past, cheap and cheerful laptops have been the way forward for me, with a few rules.
Laptops must 100% absolutely include a numpad.
Laptops must 100% absolutely include a DVD drive.
Laptops must 100% absolutely contain enough hard drive space for all my garbage.

Over the years, those rules have slowly but surely been depleted. The DVD drive became obsolete a few years ago, and ever since my switch to Javascript/browser game development, the need for epic amounts of hard drive space has also fallen.

In addition, since my switch to "Mostly Javascript", I've started writing a bunch of my little minor tools in php, rather than always falling back on Blitz3D/Max to do the handywork.

All together, I've actually been readying myself to release my reliance on Windows for quite some time, now.
But am I ready?
I still regularly rely on my ancient oldskool tools. Paintshop Pro and CoolEdit being the two main ones. Programmer's Notepad gets a TON of use, especially in this new age of Javascript/Browser coding.

As such, I've left my old MacMini running with a copy of Win10Pro. I can hop into that using Remote Desktop, and .. hopefully.. that should ease the transition somewhat.
But I'm going to try my best to use ONLY the Mac, as much as possible.

Things I'll be needing to find.
1. A decent ASCII text editor.
I've seen what harm Unicode can do to websites. Best avoided, and best to find a plain text editor to do everything.

2. A decent plain and simple pixel-based image editor.
Something to replace my aging copy of Paintshop Pro. I'm not adverse to using more recent versions of Paintshop Pro, and even own a copy of PSPv17, but I do prefer the simplicity and speed of the older PSPv7.
Something like that, on Mac, would be wonderful. I'm not sure if it exists, though..

3. Something to replace CoolEdit Pro.
I'm guessing I'll probably settle for Audacity, since that's fairly popular, as far as simple editing goes. I don't really need it to do a lot, just chop down the ends of my ALChoons, mostly, and convert them to mp3s.

And I think that's about it.

I'm hoping that I can at least get BlitzMax up and running for a couple of my frequent tools, such as the one that strips/converts my daily pixelart.
There IS a Mac edition of it, but it's rather old now, and I'm not sure it still works. There's a newer open-source version, but who knows how well it'll run on the M1 processor.
But, as I said, I still have the MacMini running Windows. So, in any of those circumstances, I can always just drag'n'drop to and from that, and run the thing there. I hope.. Maybe!!

We'll see.
Tomorrow should be Mac Day One, so stay tuned if you want to see how that goes!

Wish me luck!!
(I'm going to need it..)