The Only OS X Shortcut You Need to Remember | Hacker News Reader

The Only OS X Shortcut You Need to Remember

adamwalters.info

162 pointsadamwalters52 comments

Except in Firefox which redirects to the Mozilla website instead.

Yes, I detest applications that decide to do their own "cross-platform" thing instead of integrating smoothly with the environment's native behaviour.

What's much worse than that is when "cross-platform" apps have cargo-cult integration into the environment's native behavior.

When you middle-click on any blank space or text in Firefox on X11, by default it takes the contents of the select buffer, and does the equivalent of pasting it into the address bar and hitting go. Some jackass that doesn't actually use it read that middle-click == paste and smeared it all over the app.

When combined with its magic address bar that does "I'm feeling lucky" searches for random text, the user-perceived result is that Firefox is stalking you and taking you to random pages that tangentially have something to do with what you're working on.

Added bonus: For many years the result for any invalid URL-like string (like a missing semicolon after http) was the Microsoft homepage, because there were a lot of old high-pagerank sites linking to it with the URL as the link text. Instead of blacklisting it or fixing the underlying behavior, they just googlebombed it to point to the Wikipedia article for HTTP.

Infuriating!

I'd much rather have the same bullshit everywhere than inane platform fealty that results only in different bullshit everywhere.

I have a port of wget for Windows, and typing "wget --help" at the command prompt shows the help and loads a Windows help file in a new window.

I don't want the "environment native behaviour" there, I want text on stdout.

The environment native behavior of the command prompt is text on stdout. It's effectively not Windows, it's something like MSDOS 10. Popping up a help window is just nonsensical behavior.

Cmd + tab (cycling b/w open apps) and Cmd + ` (cycling b/w open windows of app with focus) are definitely my 2 most-used shortcuts.

Do note that is actually supposed to be Cmd + ` (the same button as the ~, and not single quotation mark)

Thanks X-Istence, was typing on my mobile with swype, got the wrong character. Corrected in the original.

Except in Office 2008, where Cmd-‘ is broken! If they didn't fix that in 2011, I am going to switch to OO.o out of spite.

Hmmm, this combination works correctly in Office 2008 on my MacBook Pro (used almost daily in Excel and Word) in Office 2008 [ver. 12.2.3 (091001) on OS X 10.6.4].

I'm a fan of Cmd + , which opens the Preferences dialog.

Shift + CMD + / doesn't work for Textmate, it says "Warning: On Leopard the menu item searching is prone to crashing, so we have disabled the key equivalent. Sorry about the inconvenience."

I get the same thing, and I am using Snow Leopard. (Even though the message references Leopard.) 10.6.4, TextMate 1.5.10.

It works fine for me in 10.6.4

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Without a third party plugin, I can only think of Spotlight, which turns out to be good enough.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts > All Applications > Show Help menu > Command Shift /

?

one which i stumbled upon by accident is pressing option when you're in a menu. e.g the apple menu at the top of the screen: If you press option while you're looking at this menu certain menu items change - in this case about this mac becomes system profiler. Also if you press shift in this situation force quite becomes force quit active application.

Metadata searches are cool though I haven't found a comprehensive description, e.g. type name:foo to find all objects with foo in the name, kind:pdf wil find all PDFs. These may be combined, e.g. name:foo kind:pdf has the expected result.

And from there, the right arrow key takes you to all the system menu items.

Shift + CMD + /? Three button shortcut for help? What happened to F1 being the universal help key?

⌘? displays help. That other shortcut only opens the help menu.

Brilliant, with Chrome and Safari you can use it to search and open any bookmarked page.

Use ctrl+F2 and then the arrow keys and return to select menu items.

   M-? is undefined

Cmd + Space for Spotlight search box is very handy.

I find myself using the Spotlight box for things I wouldn't have guessed...like looking up words in the dictionary, or doing math.

When on a webpage in Safari or in a text document within one of the applications that uses Mac OS X's native "drawing", you can hover over a word and hit Ctrl + Cmd + D to get a quick definition of a word!

Only works for English and Japanese.

Wow, okay, I already use it every day but now I know it does arithmetic as well... thanks!

Besides its capabilities as a launcher, Spotlight is also a very capable calculator. Stuff like sqrt(2pi^e) works, oh, and Cmd+C works for the results, too. Someone was really sweating the details on that one.

> Spotlight is also a very capable calculator

And a pretty nice dictionary and PDF finder.

I believe the sweat was in Calculator.app. 'Opening' Calculator to let Spotlight get something useful from Calculator.

Yup that's the only way I launch anything.

When I Spotlight for "Applications" meaning "the folder with all my applications in it", instead it finds (only) a folder named Applications somewhere deep in the XCode example code with sod all in it.

Any ideas how to get it to do what I want instead of something else? (or at least, also do what I want).

You can at least prevent Spotlight from searching in the XCode folder by manually adding it to the list in System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy.

I'm still hooked on Launchbar.

I map it to F12 (and dashboard to cmd+F12, as I rarely use it). Physical similarity with the spotlight icon's location, and lets me map cmd+space to changing input methods (ie, switching to 日本語).

I agree, I use this for pretty much everything.

I keep going back and forth between the Google Quick Search and Spotlight as my Cmd + Space shortcut.

Give Alfred a try and have the both of best worlds, I couldn't live without it now.

http://alfredapp.com

too slow, quiksilver or alfred ftw

With SSD it is as fast as quicksilver.

I cannot stress heavily enough how brilliantly fast MacOS is when running off an SSD. I thought windows was peppy when I put an SSD in my desktop. Since putting an SSD in my MBP, MacOS X went from a sluggish annoyance where icons bounced 5-10 times before an app loaded, to a speedy "no time to bounce at all" app start.

I did the same with a first generation MBP (bought in the summer 2006). I replaced the main HD with a Corsair V64, and replaced the optical drive with the old HDD with this kit[1]. The HDD now works in plain old ATA, but it doesn't matter. I use it for mass storage, not for speed.

The results are amazing. It takes:

- 21 seconds from cold boot to login prompt (and 5 more to get a responsive finder),

- 13 seconds to shut down, and

- 22 seconds to wake from deep sleep (2GB of RAM).

As you said, the apps launch almost instantly, including Office 2011 which was incredibly slow from the hard disk.

[1]http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/ ($99). They also provide an external USB case for the DVD drive.

Ifixit offers a similar adapter, cheaper ($60), but without the case. http://www.ifixit.com/Apple-Parts/9-5-mm-Optical-Bay-SATA-Ha...

I agree, but i kept wondering about the lifespan of my apple-samsung ssd, without trim.

It hasnt been slow for several years.

Mine was exceedingly slow when I had >2,000,000 files (gigabytes of versioned source code will do that). Several seconds to pull up an application by name. 10-30 seconds to pull up an infrequently-accessed document by filename. > 1 minute to pull up a PDF by content.

All of which caused a few seconds delay between every result-set returned, during which it was entirely unresponsive. It still worked faster - pressing `enter` would grab the top result when it came up - but that's unacceptably slow.

I beg to differ. It's sluggish. Depends what you are used to I guess.

I don't find it even a decent calculator, try doing a division!! It launches the calculator and doesn't even both to pre-fill the question.

It does division fine. Pre-filling would definitely be handy though.

Quicksilver or something similar is a must. I have become SO much happier with my desktop environments since embracing Quicksilver and Gnome-Do.

ios does it with the search bar in safari, but it'd be nice if spotlight would also let you search the current document, search the web, etc. all with a simple command+spacebar.

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