Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
by kaylarose on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @10:18AM
(#2437279)
IMO Spotlight is the best example of minimalist software design.
In a single universal field you have instant: app launcher, calculator, dictionary, file search, email search, contact search.
My single best tip for Mac power-users: learn what you can do with Spotlight.
Edit: grammar
Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
by redacted on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @01:12PM
(#2438108)
Spotlight also has keywords -
kind:pdf
date:yesterday
author:short_name
from:contact_name
And the boolean relations AND, OR, NOT work as you might expect.
There's a lot of cool stuff hidden in Spotlight. Try
man mdfind
Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
by redacted on Thursday April 14, 2011 @04:47PM
(#2448376)
Here is a particularly good resource on this aspect of Spotlight:
Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
by experimental on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @01:21AM
(#2440899)
I know you didn't claim Apple invented it, but I thought it would be informative to say Apple have added their own ideas but the main idea comes from BeOS, a once commercially viable operating system. These days it lives on in an open source recreation that has improved on BeOS, called Haiku. It uses a 64-bit journaling file system which has been improved now called HaikuFS that can hold 80,000 petabytes, caches so is fast and has user-definable attributes, like for contacts, music or anything you can think of really which can help you find things fast.
There's a reimplementation of Dashboard called Corkboard written by a fan so it goes both ways - good ideas are used elsewhere. :)
Command + c will copy the highlighted spotlight result.
Expose (show all windows) and drag and drop files to that window (i grab the file, while dragging show all windows by either a keybord key or hot corner and drop it to the new window)
Hold down command to move around background windows without giving it focus.
Ctrl + (arrows or numbers) to go to certain spaces.
While in spaces expose, hold down ctrl to move all of the windows of a certain application to another space.
Hold down a window's titlebar while switching spaces to move that window to the new space.
Drag folders that you frequent into the left side of finder. I have /private/etc in mine
Hold down command while clicking or pressing enter on a spotlight result will open its containing folder.
How did I forget about keyboard modifiers by holding down the alt key.
Drag a file/folder to terminal to get the path to that file printed in terminal. so I often type "cd " and then drag folder to get there
While switching apps via command+tab you can let tab go and either hide the application by pressing h or quit it by pressing q (I wish that you could minimize it by pressing m). You can also cycle backwards by pressing tilde (this only works if youre already command+tabbing) or shift+tab
* Gone from snow leopard, but i miss it* there used to be a keyboard shortcut (command, option, ctrl space) that opened a list of your last accessed files (i mistakenly found a bunch of porn website cookies on an intern's laptop once). This used to be useful to see which files you needed to upload /ftp.