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Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

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Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#511

Post by hanche »

crazygringo wrote: post #496
hanche wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen pdf files swell to ~ ten times the original size when I edit them with Preview. Apparently, Preview will reencode images upon saving, often choosing a less efficient encoding than original. The most extreme cases I encountered would be files scanned in black and white, with Fax or JBIG2 encoding. Since I use such files a lot, I use pdfpen instead for all my pdf editing tasks.

I've only ever seen that happen when re-exporting using Quartz filters, where the whole point is to re-encode, and saving an e.g. 300-page PDF will take several minutes, with a progress bar. If you're just using Preview to rearrange/combine/etc. pages, no re-encoding happens and file size stays the same. Believe me, I do a lot of PDF management in Preview. Even to the point of creating my own Quartz filters in the Co…

It’s been years since I stopped using Preview for PDF files, generally using Skim for reading and pdfpen for editing them. Perhaps something changed since then? That is good news, if so.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#512

Post by wosc »

NateEag wrote: post #22

Focusing the menubar with Control-F2. You can then navigate by arrow keys or typing. Space bar activates the highlighted menu/submenu. It makes life so much better. Control-F2 itself was slightly broken in 10.14 (IIRC), so I hacked up a dumb workaround in my Hammerspoon config: https://github.com/NateEag/dotfiles/blob/99f6b641151f85f6f78...

Thanks so much, it has been a constant annoyance for me that _sometimes_ Ctrl+F2 just doesn't do anything. It did not occur to me to check if that's a known issue, I just wrote it off as a glitch in the matrix. Your workaround is going to make my daily menu usage go much more smoothly, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#513

Post by hanche »

hanche wrote: post #511
crazygringo wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only ever seen that happen when re-exporting using Quartz filters, where the whole point is to re-encode, and saving an e.g. 300-page PDF will take several minutes, with a progress bar. If you're just using Preview to rearrange/combine/etc. pages, no re-encoding happens and file size stays the same. Believe me, I do a lot of PDF management in Preview. Even to the point of creating my own Quartz filters in the Co…

It’s been years since I stopped using Preview for PDF files, generally using Skim for reading and pdfpen for editing them. Perhaps something changed since then? That is good news, if so.

I should have tried it before replying, but did not have easy access to my laptop. Now I redid the experiment. Starting with a 24 page scanned pdf, I deleted the first page using Preview, then saved and closed the file. It swelled from 2 MB to 6.7 MB. Looking into the file, I see that all the images in the original are encoded with CCITTFaxDecode, while the images in the edited file are encoded using FlateDecode. I cannot see anything relevant to the issue in the preferences.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#515

Post by jibbers »

maps7 wrote: post #503
jibbers wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Command + L inside Spotlight to jump to the dictionary definition of the word you just typed.

Did you mean Command + D? That is what works for me (thanks for the tip!)

Oh, I didn't know that one! To summarize, within Spotlight --

Command + D: Opens Dictionary using the word you typed in Spotlight

Command + L: Jumps to dictionary definition without leaving Spotlight

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#516

Post by dtgriscom »

If you drag a window's corner, the adjoining edges resize. If you hold down Option while you do this, all four sizes resize about the center. Even better, you can press and release Option during a single drag to turn this behavior on and off incrementally, which means you can arbitrarily adjust a window with one drag (if you're persistent enough).

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#517

Post by GolDDranks »

GolDDranks wrote: post #52
Roybot wrote: post #10

Dictionary word lookup with a single gesture. https://media.giphy.com/media/Vg5tebSFuj1DFtHwrd/giphy.gif

Sadly, that used to work better than it does now. From some versions ago, it was upgraded to be "smarter" and do google searches and link lookups and whatnot. I'm nowadays struggling to get the dictionary lookup shown. That's a shame; as a non-native speaker it's a super helpful feature. I've been trying to disable the other shenanigans, but without much success.

Woah, I found a way to fix it! You need to remove the checkbox "Show Spotlight results in " in Spotlight settings. I wouldn't thought that I need to go look for settings elsewhere to fix that.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#519

Post by maps7 »

jibbers wrote: post #515
maps7 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean Command + D? That is what works for me (thanks for the tip!)

Oh, I didn't know that one! To summarize, within Spotlight -- Command + D: Opens Dictionary using the word you typed in Spotlight Command + L: Jumps to dictionary definition without leaving Spotlight

Cool - I didn't notice it doing that.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#520

Post by K7PJP »

Sirened wrote: post #400
baryphonic wrote: post #211

Batch renaming files in Finder.[1] It's quite useful and one of the few GUI-based looping operations that takes me less time than fat-fingering the shell incantation. [1] https://osxdaily.com/2015/05/28/batch-rename-files-mac-os-x-...

What in the world, that's been here the entire time? I've been looking up how to do it in bash every time I've needed to do it. It's so strange how macOS has this appearance of simplicity but just below the surface you have stuff like this

No, it was added in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Before that you needed to either use Terminal or "A Better Finder Rename" which still offers more options than Finder, including the use of metadata to rename your files.
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