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Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

thume.ca

61–70 of 232 posts

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#62

> cmd+shift+4 pops up a crosshair to take a screenshot of a region. If you hit space at after invoking the crosshairs then you can take full window screenshots. This mode is nice for marketing material as it also captures the drop shadow and rounded corners rendered properly as a transparent png.

Also if you hold `ctrl` down as well, the screenshot goes directly to your pasteboard for quick pasting and won't save a junk file on your desktop.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#63

I love how you added Option-2 for ™ as a tip, that's the only shortcut for one of those symbols I've committed to memory before for using in a jokey context.

I believe "tm" automatically corrects to "™" by default–it's one of the ones that are set up automatically to show you how to make you own autocompletions.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#65
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, applications that don't prompt for confirmation on potentially destructive Quit are broken. By this definition, all Mac Web browsers are broken, but you can fix the accidental Command-Q problem on an app-by-app basis by remapping Quit to something harder to accidentally type like Command-Shift-Q using the Keyboard pane in System Preferences. Personally, for applications like my primary browser where intentionall…

> By this definition, all Mac Web browsers are broken Chrome has a “Confirm before Quitting” toggle-option hiding in its File menu, right above Quit. Kind of wish Safari had the same.

Pretty sure this is Firefox's default behavior with multiple tabs.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#66
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow Contexts looks incredibly well designed. I'm not sure I'll actually use it over my current Hammerspoon setup, but they combine all my favorite quick selection techniques like smart ordering, fuzzy matching, providing two-character hints which will definitely select a certain item, persisting things to keep hints consistent, shortcuts where you press a modifier type and then release to activate ... What I really w…

It seems to be unmaintained.

Oh I hadn't noticed, that's real sad. Their "upcoming" feature of showing window tabs is something that would be necessary for me.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#68
post #57

Surprised no one has mentioned QuickLook. In Finder, select a file (document, image, movie, etc.) and tap the space bar to bring up QuickLook. You’ll see a full preview of that document instantly. The preview window follows your focus, so you can use mouse arrow keys to navigate between files, etc and see an updated preview. Also works in Open dialogs, Mail attachments and elsewhere.

I briefly mention the spacebar shortcut in the article but it does indeed deserve more explanation. One of my favorite macOS file browsing features for sure, miss it all the time on Linux, especially the part where it follows your focus when you use the arrow keys. Great for looking through large folders of poorly-named PDFs for the right thing.

If you’re looking for text, pdfgrep works pretty well too.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#70
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. This. The only thing I miss from Windows is Explorer. I just can't understand how macOS dev feels Finder would work like that for 20 years without much change. It resets the config and the window size for a folder at every random occasion, creates .DS_Store garbage all over, you cannot even cut files and just feels uneasy. I even enable "Quit Finder" menu and get it out of my app cycle list but it randomly resurre…

creates .DS_Store garbage all over Has Windows stopped polluting the world with Thumbs_db files? I hate when I see those things on a server.

Yes, ever since Windows Vista thumbnails are in a central per-user directory. Old thumbnails are removed automatically. Definitely an improvement over previous behavior, at this point I would say it just needs easier configurability.
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