Mac OS X Shortcuts and Tips

Sure, I may be a bit bias, but Macs rock! Apple rocks! I mean who even wants to dirty their hands with a PC or battle with Win-doze?!? In celebrating the awesomeness of the Mac and OS X, I thought that I would share a few “tips” and “tricks” that I have gathered over the years that just make Macs that much more awesome!

  • In any Finder window or Open/Save dialog, you can hit command + shift + G to get a location bar with which you can directly type in the “go to” address. What is even sweeter is that it will tab complete for you! If you are a linux person, you can also use things like ~ to reference the home directory…
  • Screenshots *click*: You can press command + shift + 4 to capture screen shot of a dragged area. If you press space bar while you have the crosshiars, you can click to capture an entire window!
  • Switch between applications: By pressing command + tab you can easily move between application. If you do not release the command key you can use your mouse or the arrow keys to further navigate. But wait, there is more! You can press the ‘Q‘ key to quit out of an application or the ‘H‘ key to hide an application so long as you keep the command key held while doing it.
  • While in the finder, you can press the space bar key to pop open a file preview. If you hold the option key when you press the space bar key it will launch the preview in full screen mode.
  • In many Mac Apps you can option-drag (hold option while dragging with the mouse) to select a rectangular area of non-continuous text. If you hold the command key while dragging instead of the option key, you can select disjointed spans of text.
  • Force Commands:
    control + alt + command + eject to shut down computer
    control + command + escape to restarts computer
    alt + command + escape will kill an app
    common + option + escape will open the force quit application dialogue
    command + comma will open preferences

Terminal Tricks:

  • Drag any file into terminal from the finder to print the complete file path
  • Add a space in your doc: Type the following command into terminal
    1. defaults writecom.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{“tile-type”=”spacer-tile”;}
    2. repeat step one as many times as you would like spaces (you can easily get rid of them so I usually make a whole bunch)
    3. killall Dock

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