List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#1

Post by jason_tko » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:51 AM UTC

List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks
apple.stackexchange.com

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#2

Post by m-r-a-m » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 4:19 AM UTC

Here's a good time killer (I think I got all of the domains in there):

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=hidden%20features%20of...

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#3

Post by gdubs » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 4:22 AM UTC

A personal favorite is setting a hyper-fast key repeat via terminal:

  defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 0

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#4

Post by miles » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 4:36 AM UTC

Here are the comments from the last time this appeared on HN a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2436198

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#5

Post by aatish » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 5:06 AM UTC

I have one: press shift and alt while changing volume or brightness and you can change it in fine-grained steps. Not super useful, but kind of neat.

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#6

Post by dylanpyle » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 5:35 AM UTC

Didn't see this one on the list - while Command+Tabbing, if you hold down Option while letting go of Command at the end, you'll open a new window in the specified application if it currently doesn't have any open.

It might sound confusing, but it's quite useful if you've closed all the windows of a given app but still have it running.

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#7

Post by salgernon » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 5:46 AM UTC

Select-all, cmd-c copy (in a document or terminal)

Select a word or symbol of interest, and cmd-e to get it in the find buffer.

$ pbpaste | fgrep -i `pbpaste -pboard find`

I have this aliased to pbg, so will typically pipe the output to awk or some such.

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#8

Post by mh- » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 5:50 AM UTC

dylanpyle wrote: post #6

Didn't see this one on the list - while Command+Tabbing, if you hold down Option while letting go of Command at the end, you'll open a new window in the specified application if it currently doesn't have any open. It might sound confusing, but it's quite useful if you've closed all the windows of a given app but still have it running.

wow, thanks for this. when I switched to Mac last year I actually googled around about shortcuts to deal with the lack of a universal 'restore minimized' shortcut.

this doesn't solve it entirely, I think, but can't believe I never came across it.

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#9

Post by mh- » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 5:56 AM UTC

when you pipe something to pbcopy, it doesn't strip any trailing newline:

    echo hi | pbcopy

pasting this would get you hi. so if you want to put the output of a command in the clipboard, you can do something like (where `find .` is your command):

    echo -n $(find .) | pbcopy

that will take advantage of the fact that subshells discard a trailing newline (at least in bash, zsh. probably others..)

Re: List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks

#10

Post by nodata » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 6:31 AM UTC

Anyone know how to filter a list of files in a Finder window by a string?