Quick and Nerdy

Place your cursor with the mouse

When entering long commands in the terminal, making changes or fixing mistakes in the middle of the command can slow you down. Moving your cursor over one character at a time to get the to point where the change is needed takes too much time! Fortunately on a Mac you can actually use your mouse to position the cursor wherever you want in the current line.

The trick is to hold down the ‘Option’ key while clicking. Move your mouse pointer where you want the cursor and ‘Option-Click’. When doing this the cursor will actually move to that point in the line. I didn’t believe it until I tried it. It really works! Another command line time saver.

Apple, Command Line, Mac cli, command line, cursor, Mac, mouse, tip

Copy - Paste Relief!

For people like me who work extensively on the web, copying and pasting can be a huge pain. The main pain point is when you copy some text from a web page and don’t want all of the formatting when you paste it somewhere else, like an email or a blog post. Most people end up copying the content into a work processor like Textmate or Notepad and then re-copying and re-pasting. What a hassle!

Well, there is a handy built-in shortcut in Google Chrome (my choice for best browser) that automatically removes formatting when you paste. Yay! If you are on a Mac, the shortcut is ‘Command-Option-Shift-v’ and if you are on Windows it is ‘Control-Shift-v’.

The 4 key shortcut on Mac is a bit of a ‘handful’ but it is well worth it.

Mac, Web, Windows chrome, copy-paste, tip