I've ended up doing a few "jumping-over-the-hoop" type of customization to make this box more useable for me, and the following is the list so far:
Caps Lock as Control.
It's indispensable. However, this isn't as good as on Windows or Linux, because of Command-vs-Control split on Mac - on Windows or Linux, control key is the most frequently used modifier for keyboard shortcuts, hence having caps lock mapped to control naturally makes the most frequently access modifier key more accessible. That benefit is only half on Mac, because a lot of shortcuts use Command key instead of Control. While some of the key mappings can be changed to use control, not everything can (i.e. if there's no corresponding menu item). So I still have to press the awkwardly located Command key.
Auto-hide the menu bar.
When I run Chrome or Terminal, I rarely need the menu bar because 99% of things I want daily can be done through the keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture or anything already in the window that I don't want that precious vertical screen real estate wasted (especially given the vertically-short screen of MBP, the top is much more useful than the bottom - after all, at least the bottom third of the screen is outside the ergonomically comfortable viewing area, even when the MBP is sitting on a desk). I don't want the menu bar always hanging there. Thankfully, at least there's a way to change this through editing info.plist for each application. So now I have Terminal, Chrome, Safari and Picasa with menu bar hiding. This gives me back the nice, clean look of each application with more vertical real estate (if you haven't guessed yet, I have Doc also set to auto-hide). This isn't all happy news BTW. If you use Spaces to move windows to a different space, auto-hide menu bar sometimes breaks. I haven't figured out exactly when this happens, but when this happens, the menu bar will not hide even though you have set the property. So a workaround brings another annoyance by itself. Guh.
Terminal with FFM.
This only works between terminals. So it's not that big of a difference, but at least it's better than nothing. If only Terminals can get focus under mouse without getting raised...
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