Not a native tip, but using hyperdock has made window management on OSX so much nicer thanks to it's smart porting of win 7 features like dock window previews, dragging and window to the top and having it fill the screen. Can't rave about that little app enough!
Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#72I couldn't see it in that list, but my favourite can't-live-without shortcut is CMD + ~ to switch between windows of the same app (for example, if you have 10 textmate windows open it will flip between them). CMD + SHFT + ~ to go the other way.
I use this frequently. Unfortunately it doesn't work with Photoshop.
The reverse does. cmd+shift+~
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#73CMD-down will open the selected file in the Finder (same as double-clicking).
cmd-o too.
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something I've always wondered though - did emacs take them from readline or did readline take them from emacs? How old is readline? Where did all of those C-a, C-e, etc conventions come from?
They came from emacs. Readline is now around v6, readline v2 seems to have been from the mid 1990s. There is a smaller set of standard commands for killing (C-h for char, C-w for word, C-u for line) which are used in many terminal apps. They are orthogonal to emacs, and probably about as old (1970s).
Those emacs style editing commands actually came from TECO in the 70s. Crazy that those editing commands are hardwired into my brain nearly 40 years later.
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#75The big one that I went through recently was killing startup items. You tend to hoard them over time, especially with a dev machine. Look in, and clear out in /Library/StartupItems and /System/Library/StartupItems Like any good UNIX, there are a dozen other ways that applications can launch themselves in OS X, so run a ps and find processes that you don't need and figure out where they are being started. I alias ever…
I trust you know what you are doing. I'd like to warn others to be careful of what is removed, especially if you didn't put it there. The price is stability.
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#76The first two are part of the reason why I hate using Windows at work. The fact that you cannot drag files to their icons and have that file opened in the application seems like something out of the past. To scroll a window in Windows, the window needs to have focus. To scroll a scroll pane in an active window, that pane needs to have focus -- it is maddening especially when hover events work for non-focused windows…
> To scroll a window in Windows, the window needs to have focus.
Katmouse http://ehiti.de/katmouse/
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#77"I love the fact that OS X will scroll the window that the mouse is hovering over, even if another application has focus. That way I can scroll an example that I am coding in TextMate without having to lose keyboard control on TM" This also happens on Windows (at least on Chrome) but Windows goes even further: you can click through a link or button on a non-focused window. On OS X, in order to follow a link or click…
"Windows goes even further: you can click through a link or button on a non-focused window."
This is a interaction design mistake. On Windows, if you click inside an unfocused window you can perform an action otherwise unintended, Mac OS X's way and Haiku's (www.haiku-os.org) is correct. Interestingly Firefox follows the Mac way, but on at least Windows Chrome does not, and if you happen to unintentionally select the close tab button, you're tab close and if you're in Incognito mode, you lose that tab because there is no history.
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#78A few I can think of: - Open the Apple menu. Now hold Shift. More menu options! Now try holding Opt. Even more menu options! This works for several Apple applications. - Hold Opt when clicking on a menubar icon for extra information. For example, holding Opt and clicking the WiFi icon in the menubar brings up the signal strength, IP address and other useful information. Likewise for the rest of the icons. - In Spotli…
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Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#79A few I can think of: - Open the Apple menu. Now hold Shift. More menu options! Now try holding Opt. Even more menu options! This works for several Apple applications. - Hold Opt when clicking on a menubar icon for extra information. For example, holding Opt and clicking the WiFi icon in the menubar brings up the signal strength, IP address and other useful information. Likewise for the rest of the icons. - In Spotli…
I always use Cmd-H to hide. The minimize/zoom has never been very useful for me.
Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use spotlight for all kinds of math (12 / 4) * (44 + 35) etc Command + c will copy the highlighted spotlight result. Expose (show all windows) and drag and drop files to that window (i grab the file, while dragging show all windows by either a keybord key or hot corner and drop it to the new window) Hold down command to move around background windows without giving it focus. Ctrl + (arrows or numbers) to go to cert…
IMO Spotlight is the best example of minimalist software design. In a single universal field you have instant: app launcher, calculator, dictionary, file search, email search, contact search. My single best tip for Mac power-users: learn what you can do with Spotlight. Edit: grammar
I know you didn't claim Apple invented it, but I thought it would be informative to say Apple have added their own ideas but the main idea comes from BeOS, a once commercially viable operating system. These days it lives on in an open source recreation that has improved on BeOS, called Haiku. It uses a 64-bit journaling file system which has been improved now called HaikuFS that can hold 80,000 petabytes, caches so is fast and has user-definable attributes, like for contacts, music or anything you can think of really which can help you find things fast.
There's a reimplementation of Dashboard called Corkboard written by a fan so it goes both ways - good ideas are used elsewhere. :)