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Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

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21–30 of 140 posts

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#21

Not a shortcut exactly, but get some app that adds shortcuts to snap the current window to various presets. I use Spectacle, but there are several.

I use BetterSnapTool. Gives me the same kind of "windows key + direction" usage that I came to love when I was a windows developer.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#24
Command-e, put the selected text on the find clipboard.

Then command-e, command-g (find next) will search for the selected text without sacrificing the copy/paste clipboard.

Also, the find clipboard is shared between apps, so you can command-e in Safari, then command-g in Xcode.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#25
Cmd+shift+/ - brings up help search to search through menu items. Huge feature to me over windows, Linux-based desktop environments.

Not exactly a shortcut, but I once made a gesture-driven shortcut app (https://thimblemac.com) - it’s been on hiatus the past couple years but have been wondering if there’s value in it for programming work contexts.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#26
post #22

Spectacle ( https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#keyboard-shortcuts ) will change your life with better/faster window management. And Karabiner Elements ( https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements ) to remap keys to something more useful (who uses Caps Lock anymore?)

I use Karabiner to map symbols to the home row with a Caps Lock modifier.

It's really nice to use k for "(" and l for ")". I don't have to reach up two rows.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#28
post #5

Not a shortcut exactly, but remap caps lock to ctrl. So much easier in terminal and for using shortcuts like ctrl-A & ctrl-E for beginning and end of line, etc.

I found mapping Caps to Ctrl caused too much RSI.

It's better to use a full size keyboard and use two hands for keyboard combos, e.g. for Ctrl+A use right Ctrl, for Ctrl+N use left Ctrl, for Ctrl+E use right control. Takes a little while to master but it puts much less pressure on your fingers.

Mapping Caps to Esc is a good choice though.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#29
cntrl+a: go to start of a line

cntrl+p: go up one line

cntrl+n: go down one line

cntrl+k: cut line proceeding cursor

cntrl+f: forward one char

cntrl+b: back one char

These work everywhere you can type text on Mac: including in this HN text box, in the url bar, etc. I absolutely love these shortcuts...

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