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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?

#531

Post by mattalbie »

WA wrote: post #190

Increase Finder window size by dragging (in home directory), then press Cmd + Shift + E to make Finder open new windows with the new size. Works until a reboot. Why? Because those stupid windows are too small by default.

You can also do this by opening a new window, resizing/positioning it how you'd like, then immediately closing it. Next time you create a new window it will be exactly the same.

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

#534

Post by mattalbie »

I didn't see this one anywhere. You can use modifier keys in combination with Hot Corners.

Go to [System Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners] and when you make your selection just press the modifier you'd like to use.

I've always found hot corners too easily triggered, for me this strikes the right balance.

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

#535

Post by heyvirgil »

Using the exposé command to show desktop grab a file from finder then pressing the exposé command to show all windows of the current application and dropping the file I grabbed from the finder into the desired window, saves me a TON of time in photoshop and other design apps, and for attachments in files. I custom map mine the way they were in 10.4 when tis feature was released, f11 desktop, f12 all windows, f13 current applications windows.

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

#536

Post by heyvirgil »

System Preferences>Keyboard>Text. I use this to create trigger letter combinations that auto complete things I type frequently, particularly for business correspondence- for example if I type "FRA-", in any application, it prompts me with the option to autocomplete "For routing/assignment" I actually have someones difficult to spell's name in there too but have omitted it here. It"s useful to use ALL CAPS as the trigger. You can even stack the triggers, I have several individuals whom I may send a message to with "FOR ROUTING/ASSIGNMENT". to and I have them all triggered by the same capital letter combo, and I am presented with a dropdown list that use the down arrow to select which I want to use.

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

#537

Post by heyvirgil »

jlturner wrote: post #187

This has been around for a long time but most people don’t know about it: Dragging and dropping files from the finder into an file selector window (ie. Open File in most programs) will navigate to that file and select it. As others mentioned this works in terminal as well to give you a path, but actually this generally works in any text box (unless it specifically handles paths being drag ‘n dropped). This also works…

Speaking of space delimited, you can also grab a whole directory full of any item and drop into numbers or excel and it will create a list of said files. Tab delimited. Great for inventorying media etc.

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

#538

Post by heyvirgil »

throwaway333444 wrote: post #8

Setting most (but not all) system preference using the terminal. It made doing clean installs every year so much easier. https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos

Dotfiles are wizard AF. Been using them on my departmental deployments for a while now and will never go back.

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

#539

Post by nabeards »

heyvirgil wrote: post #537
jlturner wrote: post #187

This has been around for a long time but most people don’t know about it: Dragging and dropping files from the finder into an file selector window (ie. Open File in most programs) will navigate to that file and select it. As others mentioned this works in terminal as well to give you a path, but actually this generally works in any text box (unless it specifically handles paths being drag ‘n dropped). This also works…

Speaking of space delimited, you can also grab a whole directory full of any item and drop into numbers or excel and it will create a list of said files. Tab delimited. Great for inventorying media etc.

This doesn't work for me. Are you dropping the full folder or all the items in it? And you are dropping onto a table in Numbers?

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

#540

Post by juancn »

K7PJP wrote: post #521
juancn wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The touch bar is a no-go for me. I really use the F-keys a lot, so I have it on F-key all the time. My ideal setup would be to make the trackpad a tad smaller, add the physical function keys again and the touch bar above. I don't think it was a good tradeoff for many use cases.

I’m curious, what do you use F-keys for? I’ve moved to a mech keyboard with no F-keys, as I've never had much use for them. I do have a few choice custom shortcuts, using Command-Option-based shortcuts.

Coding mostly. I know by heart most of IntelliJ shortcuts. Things like find usages, type safe move and copy of code, rename of entities, etc. are F-key bound by default. I don’t customize because customization of defaults makes it harder to work on other people’s computers.

With the pandemic is kind of a non issue, but at the office it’s quite common.

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