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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?

#81

Post by JadeNB »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #53

Cmd-Ctrl-Space (⌘⌃␣) for the character/emoji picker. Also, under Keyboard in preferences, check the "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar" option to get it as a menu-bar icon. This also includes the keyboard viewer, which is handy to figure certain Shift-Opt-Whaterver combos for seldom-used characters. EDIT: Updated with the actual default command.

> Ctrl-Opt-Space for the character/emoji picker.

I think this may not be the default; it doesn't work for me.

While speaking of the character picker, does anyone know a way to get less broken search in the picker? For example, I frequently find myself looking for math italic characters in Unicode. Despite the description being, say, "MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL A", it doesn't come up when I search for 'small'. In this case searching for 'mathematical' or 'italic' works, but there are other cases where I just have to guess search terms randomly (or go look up Unicode tables elsewhere).

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

#82

Post by jakkals »

I usually have multiple Bash tabs open in Terminal, and I needed a quick way to see what each tab contained. The following bash script will set the Title of the tab.

  #!/bin/bash
  # Sets the title of the Terminal Window / Tab.
  # title foo => Sets the title of the Terminal Window / Tab to foo. 
  echo -n -e "\033]0;$1\007"

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

#83

Post by Solstinox »

danthewireman wrote: post #55
Solstinox wrote: post #16

Double click text to select a word. Triple click text to select the whole paragraph. For decades I assumed that there’s some weird fluky behavior when trying to select a word and accidentally selecting the paragraph.

You can also double click a word, keep the mouse button down, and drag. This will select whole words. I use this a lot.

I didn’t know that either, thank you! It works with triple-click paragraphs too.

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

#88

Post by lysium »

jacknews wrote: post #65

shift-ctrl-command-4 to crop a section of the screen to the clipboard. Then "File"->"New From Clipboard" in Preview to be able to save it as a file.

If you omit 'ctrl', macOS will save it as a file right away.

I've changed the destination to the downloads folder, so I can drag the file from the dock where I want it to be.

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

#89

Post by wildrhythms »

pcr910303 wrote: post #66

While this isn't a generic feature, I want to say that everyone should try embracing the non-keyboard nature of macOS (as it always has been done), not just complaining that some of the elements are not reachable in the keyboard.[0] Try using the mouse, trackpad (which is top-quality), and the Touch Bar (which I guess will be the most controversial?). Especially drag-n-drop. I'm not sure if it's already mentioned, bu…

Isn't the touchbar explicitly a "keyboard nature" type of interaction? You mentioned Mac OS having a non-keyboard nature, and then tout the touchbar?

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

#90

Post by frankjr »

frankjr wrote: post #68

Smart Folders (Finder -> File -> New Smart Folder). It's not exactly hidden but I never paid too much attention to it. It's essentially a way to create a folder whose content is dynamically updated based on your search conditions. For example, you can create a smart folder that contains all PDF files matching a certain name pattern within a given directory (or the whole disk) [0]. You can get really advanced, there's…

Oh and I almost forgot - there's also a similar concept of Smart Playlists within iTunes (Command+Option+N) [0].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/eXmwb42.png

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