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Function keys productivity trick

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Re: Function keys productivity trick

#101

Post by frankjr »

You can do something similar (albeit less fancy) without using any 3rd party applications on macOS.

1. Open Automator.app and create a Quick action.

2. Drag "Launch Application" to the workflow and choose an application to open. Save it.

3. Open Preferences -> Shortcuts -> Services and assign a keyboard shortcut to your action. Unfortunately, macOS will not let you assign many combinations. The other annoying thing is that running the shortcut is not instantaneous, there seems to be a noticeable delay before the action executes.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#103

Post by robertoandred »

deathanatos wrote: post #64
marcosdumay wrote: post #30

You know, the CTRL-Fn combinations are usually mapped to virtual workspaces on Linux, what is much more powerful than applications and give you the same kind of speedup. Who organizes things around application anyway, instead of windows? Anyway, no, it's bad to remap the Fn keys. They have been used to fast intra-application navigation since they appeared, and they are still in wide use. (Does the author not use appl…

> Who organizes things around application anyway, instead of windows? macOS. There's no Alt+Tab, for example: no way to switch between two arbitrary windows on the Z-stack¹. The not-equivalent that exists is ⌘+Tab, and it switches apps ; the usability of it, vs. Alt+Tab, is horrendous. (It fronts stuff you don't want, covering up stuff you do want.) There are workspaces … but I have found them hard to get productive…

How would a window-based ⌘+Tab even work? It'd be a million miles long and take forever to cycle to the thing you want.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#104

Post by chadlavi »

All the apps I use the most are open most of the time. I can just use cmd+tab to switch between them quickly.

To each their own, but this feels unnecessary to me in my own personal workflow. I've never thought to myself "boy I wish I could open one specific app, that wasn't already open, with a single keystroke"

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#105

Post by blueblob »

chadlavi wrote: post #104

All the apps I use the most are open most of the time. I can just use cmd+tab to switch between them quickly. To each their own, but this feels unnecessary to me in my own personal workflow. I've never thought to myself "boy I wish I could open one specific app, that wasn't already open, with a single keystroke"

On Windows, win+number will open the item in the number position in your bottom bar. I rarely use it for the same reason as you.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#106

Post by awelxtr »

wink wrote: post #99
awelxtr wrote: post #2

Windows users can do this by pressing Win+digit with open apps or apps you have pinned on the task bar. Linux Mint, as with many other windows shortcuts, has this also

It's ok, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to register with "multiples of the same application" open, i.e. if I have Firefox at Win-2 then it's always the first window that was opened (which is fine most of the time) but if I need the other Firefox window then it's alt-tabbing again. No, tabs don't help here, I don't have 50 Firefox windows open, but often a second.

Win+Ctrl+number

You're welcome!

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#107

Post by grincho »

iambateman wrote: post #72
the_gipsy wrote: post #35

No, you're using the computer wrong. See, you should use a tiling window manager with several workspaces and shortcuts without having to look at your keyboard, e.g. Meta+4 to go to workspace 4 where you have your chat apps.

Any recommendation for Mac?

I've been doing this for >10 years with https://manytricks.com/butler/. Works great! You can also bind snippets of text, scripts, etc.

I can't overstate how important it is to have a keyboard that groups function keys into "islands" of (generally) 4 so you can touch-type them. An ergonomics consultant once observed that the source of my neck pain was that I looked at the keyboard while typing. As a touch-typist, I found this puzzling—until we realized it was just the function keys. :-)

Btw, LaunchBar (https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html) makes an excellent 2nd-level util for things not common enough to merit a single keychord.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#109

Post by monroewalker »

Karabiner has already been mentioned here but I'll add that goku (https://github.com/yqrashawn/GokuRakuJoudo) is THE way to setup Karabiner and it can be hard to overcome the extremely verbose and unergonomic default json config of Karabiner otherwise. Goku also makes it trivial to add shortcuts which are activated by quickly pressing one key while another is held. I use this for the kind of launch mode described in the OP. eg. w + e = editor (Intellij), w + r = chrome, w + f = firefox.. The drawback to these shortcuts is that they can unintentionally be activated when regularly typing since we don't always release a key before pressing the next. That's only happened seldomly for me though since "w" isn't a frequently used letter and I've set the shortcut activation window pretty low so the w + key has to be pressed essentially immediately after w.

Similarly, I use q + w for previous tab, q + e for next tab, and s+d to open the clipboard history from Alfred

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#110

Post by the-printer »

nahuel0x wrote: post #40

If macOS didn't added a very annoying fade-out/fade-in delay when switching Spaces, you could simply use them with maximized apps and hotkeys for switching them. Another design mistake from Apple.

My guess is that there’s a Reduce Motion option in the accessibility preferences like on iOS.
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