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.
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.
Have you ever noticed that wide grey bubble in the top right of some of your Mac application windows? When I first moved to Mac it took a while before I even noticed it. Its actually quite handy.
The button, sometimes called the ‘lozenge’ is used in applications that have a ‘Hide Toolbar’ option in their ‘View’ menu.
In Finder the button will hide both the toolbar and the sidebar. If you command-click the button it will modify how the toolbar is displayed, cycling through variations of words and buttons, buttons only, words only and various different sizes of buttons etc.
The Lozenge
Another handy use of the lozenge is installing an app. When doing so you are often presented with the window that has the app icon. Sometimes there will be an Applications icon that you can simply drag the app icon into in order to move the app to the Applications folder. When this isn’t the case people usually think they need to open another Finder window in order to drag the app to the Applications folder. However, the lozenge can save you this trouble. Simply click on it and a sidebar will appear and you can drag the app to the Applications folder listed there. Nice!
Some other applications that have the ‘lozenge’ include:
Mail, Preview and Adium.
If you like to work from the command line there are many keyboard shortcuts that can make your life easier. Two of my favourites are control+a and control+e. When you are have some text entered and you want to quickly get to the start or end of the entered text these little shortcuts will save you some key-presses.
ctrl + a: moves the cursor to the start of the line
ctrl + e: moves the cursor to the end of the line
Many of you will already know about these handy shortcuts but if you haven’t I think you’ll really appreciate them.
