40 tips in 40 minutes show notes

David and Merlin haven’t even seen this site yet, I don’t think, so it will be a bit before I get links from their presentations up. I’m posting some of my own notes in the meantime. Watch for news about more tips soon!

Spotlight

• Command Enter in Spotlight
  • Problem: You found your file but you don’t want to open it with the default application.
  • Solution: Command-Enter switches to Finder and selects the file in its current location.
• Spotlight Calculator
  • Problem: you need to do a quick calculation while working, and Calculator takes too long to load just to tell you a basic sum.
  • Solution: Open Spotlight with Command-Space, type your expression and wait for a second. The first result will be the answer to the problem. Pressing Command-C while it’s selected will put the result on your clipboard. Escape returns you back to your application where you can paste it if you need to.

Mail.app

• Accessing messages from a full-screen compose window
  • Problem: you’ve started a reply or new message while Mail is in Lion full-screen mode. Now you need to see another message to grab some info, but you can’t because the full-screen compose window blocks access to your messages.
  • Solution: Command-Option-N will open a new full-screen message viewer in its own space. It’s not the prettiest, but it’s faster than saving a draft, closing, finding the message, copying and reopening the draft.
• Change Reply to Reply-All without starting over
  • You hit Reply on an email, then halfway through your response you realize there were a dozen other people cc’d who need to see your response.
  • Solution: Type Command-Shift-R at any time while composing an email reply and if there are people cc’d in the original message, they’ll be added to the cc on the current reply.

Key combinations

• Command-Option-Click in the Dock
  • Problem: Too many windows on the screen. Must concentrate. On Twitter.
  • Solution: Cmd-Opt-Click on an icon in the Dock will hide everything but that application.
• Opt-click force-quit
  • Problem: sometimes applications freeze but don’t offer the option to Force Quit in the Dock menu.
  • Solution: Option key to the rescue, as usual.
• Command-Shift-G
  • Problem: you know exactly where a nested folder is, but clicking through the Finder takes too long.
  • Solution: Command-Shift-G in the Finder (or any save/open dialog) opens Go To… and lets you type a Unix path directly to the folder. Tab-completion works (first match only).
• Q in Command-Tab switcher
  • Problem: You need to quit a series of applications all at once.
  • Solution: Start the application switcher with Command-Tab, then use Tab and ` (backtick, or Shift-Tab) to select each app, then type q while it’s highlighted to quit it and move to the next app in line.

Third Party tools

• BetterTouchTool
  • Problem: you have a trackpad, but feel like you’re just not using gestures to the full extent of the human imagination.
  • Solution: BetterTouchTool (free) can assign actions and shortcuts to an insane number of trackpad and Magic Mouse gestures. It also handles keyboard hotkey assignments and window management.
• iTerm2
  • Problem: Terminal is cool, but you’re cooler
  • Solution: iTerm2 (free) brings split panes, regex-based smart selections, paste history and more to the game.
• TotalFinder
  • Problem: Finder windows get scattered and impossible to find.
  • Solution: TotalFinder augments the default file navigator to add tabs and split-pane file management.

Terminal tricks

• launchd
  • Problem: you need to schedule a script, app or command to run at a certain time or at certain intervals
  • Solution: launchd is Apple’s answer to cron. It’s a plist-based system that lets you schedule anything using the same tools that OS X uses for scheduled events. If you have something to prove to the world, you can edit these plist files by hand and load them with launchctl, but Lingon (App Store) makes life much simpler with a GUI for editing all of the necessary options.
• pbcopy
  • Problem: You need to copy the output of a command from the terminal or within a script.
  • Solution: Apple provides the pbcopy utility which accepts any piped input and pushes it to the system pasteboard. (pb is for pasteboard). It works with both plain text and rich text data, and there’s a companion utility called pbpaste. It does exactly what you think it does.
• mdfind
  • Problem: Spotlight has proven to be very useful for you on the Desktop, but you need those search results for a script.
  • Solution: mdfind has full access to both human syntax Spotlight queries and predicate-based queries for detailed, accurate searches. Also see mdls and mdimport.

Super-nerdy

• KeyBindings
  • Problem: You want a universal set of keystrokes for performing text actions that aren’t typically available in Cocoa apps.
  • By default, the text fields in most Mac applications have Emacs keybindings available in addition to command, option and arrow key navigation, but you can directly control just about any text action and trigger by editing a DefaultKeyBinding.dict file in your Library folder. (~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict). More info.