Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks • Hacker News Board

Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks

#81

Post by experimental » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 5:55 AM UTC

I don't use OS X, but I thought I'd share a few bits of information. Also this page demonstrates why native local software is so great - no redundancy (exposing a dictionary to all apps), low memory footprint etc.

- In 10.6 Snow Leopard, hold Space to zoom in on a window in Exposé.

- Not a hint exactly, but there exists at least one unnecessary dissatisfaction people have of Finder. In real life, you cut text and paste it in a scrapbook, but you don't cut an object like a folder with scissors in order to move it. You usually use a hand or two. Therefore the inability to "move" an object using "cut" (Cmd+X) is the correct behavior. Secondly it prevents you from accidentally pasting a file elsewhere, then needing to remember if you meant to do that, or undo. Adding visibility in some way is not enough, and you can still move by dragging the object to the desktop or wherever else.

Note: Edited for spacing.

Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks

#82

Post by experimental » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 8:24 AM UTC

experimental wrote: post #75

nikcub wrote: post #6

The 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.

Can somebody explain how this doesn't contribute to the discussion? I was trying not to tell nikcub something they may already know, and trying to be helpful for anyone else while not making assumptions on the knowledge of anyone else.

Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks

#83

Post by nikcub » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 12:26 PM UTC

experimental wrote: post #82

experimental wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can somebody explain how this doesn't contribute to the discussion? I was trying not to tell nikcub something they may already know, and trying to be helpful for anyone else while not making assumptions on the knowledge of anyone else.

I have no idea, I thought it was a valid point and probably something I should have mentioned

Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks

#84

Post by iaskwhy » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 11:05 PM UTC

experimental wrote: post #77

iaskwhy wrote: post #15

"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…

I understand your point of view but just because you might do something by accident it doesn't mean it's a design mistake. There's some advantage for each method, I prefer to make a mistake a day a week than being forced to click twice everytime I'm using side-by-side windows (like when I'm writing code and testing).

Re: Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks

#85

Post by redacted » Thu, Apr 14, 2011, 8:47 PM UTC

redacted wrote: post #53

kaylarose wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Spotlight also has keywords - kind:pdf date:yesterday author:short_name from:contact_name And the boolean relations AND, OR, NOT work as you might expect. There's a lot of cool stuff hidden in Spotlight. Try man mdfind to play around with command-line Spotlight.

Here is a particularly good resource on this aspect of Spotlight:

http://hints.macworld.com/dlfiles/spotlight_cmds.txt