Helpful Mac OS X tips
Now that I've joined a team of full on Railers who all develop on Macs, I've had to jump in to the Mac OS X environment with both feet. After just staring at my Macbook for about a good 30 minutes when I first got it, I quickly had to adapt my old windows habits and shortcuts to my new Mac environment. This is mostly inspired by a recent post at Juixe TechKnow about the Mac OS X F11 key. So here's my list, feel free to add on...
press F11 - is like "Show Desktop" in Windows. It moves all windows out of the way. Pressing it again brings the windows back.
press F12 - Shows you your widgets(proper name?). I still have the defaults on mine which are the Calculator, Weather, Clock and Calendar.
press F10 - Tiles the windows of whatever program you have open. For example, if you have 4 FireFox windows open because you detest tabs, pressing F10 will tile them for you.
press F9 - Tiles all of your non-minimized windows.
press Apple+Shift+(Number 4) - All together - Changes your cursor into a little target looking icon which you can click and drag to create a screenshot of the area you selected. The screenshot gets saved to your desktop with a name like "Picture 1.png". Awesome.
Terminal Tip - while in Terminal, you don't even have to fully type out your directory or file names. Just type the first few letters and hit tab and if that file is the only one with that name, it will fill it in for you. for example, if you're in the root of your rails app, my-awesome-computer:~/desktop/appz/rails4life and you type in 'scr' and then hit the tab key, you get script. Then type 'se' and hit tab and you get 'server'.
Textmate - Best text editor ever. My tip? Use it.
So those are the tips I've found handy so far. Anything else I should know about?
press F11 - is like "Show Desktop" in Windows. It moves all windows out of the way. Pressing it again brings the windows back.
press F12 - Shows you your widgets(proper name?). I still have the defaults on mine which are the Calculator, Weather, Clock and Calendar.
press F10 - Tiles the windows of whatever program you have open. For example, if you have 4 FireFox windows open because you detest tabs, pressing F10 will tile them for you.
press F9 - Tiles all of your non-minimized windows.
press Apple+Shift+(Number 4) - All together - Changes your cursor into a little target looking icon which you can click and drag to create a screenshot of the area you selected. The screenshot gets saved to your desktop with a name like "Picture 1.png". Awesome.
Terminal Tip - while in Terminal, you don't even have to fully type out your directory or file names. Just type the first few letters and hit tab and if that file is the only one with that name, it will fill it in for you. for example, if you're in the root of your rails app, my-awesome-computer:~/desktop/appz/rails4life and you type in 'scr' and then hit the tab key, you get script. Then type 'se' and hit tab and you get 'server'.
Textmate - Best text editor ever. My tip? Use it.
So those are the tips I've found handy so far. Anything else I should know about?
Labels: Mac OS X, ruby on rails, Tips
4 Comments:
At 1:54 PM, Darcy said…
tip: turn off dashboard.
quick googled-link:
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2005/08/disabledashboard/index.php
tip: press Apple+Shift+(Number 3) full-screen screenshot
tip: you can quit/hide an app from the Apple-Tab list of applications
tip: Apple-Tilde cycles windows in the current app
tip: Apple-esc brings up front row. (this freaked me out the first couple times i did it by accident... what the crap did i hit???)
tip: checkout the Keyboard Shortcuts preference in System Preferences for a ton of others
couple other apps to know about if you don't already:
- Quicksilver (worth all the hype)
- SSHKeychain
- Growl
- Flip4Mac
- GeekTool
- OmniOutliner
- OmniGraffle
the only thing that sucks going Win->Mac is the loss of TortoiseSVN. SVN apps on the Mac are the suck. better to learn svn cli anyhow i guess.
At 11:20 AM, Curtis said…
Awesome tips!
At 7:01 PM, Anonymous said…
There are so many, but one I like to use is highlight any text in any cocoa app and hit Shift+Command+Y
This will copy the text to a stickie..
I'm surprised that there aren't more people adding comments here with all the wonderful OS X features.
Oh, and Darcy, command line is the only way to go with SVN.. thanks for the Terminal shift tip. I have been working with that app for so long and never new that.
At 9:23 PM, Curtis said…
and another awesome tip, thanks!
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