Month: May 2017

Jumping between Terminal and Finder

Jumping between Terminal and Finder

Depending on the situation, sometimes Finder can be the best way to interact with the file system and sometimes Terminal is better. There are a couple of little tricks for jumping.

Jump from Finder → Terminal

Tip #1

Terminal has two Services available called New Terminal Tab and New Terminal Tab at Folder.

With a folder selected in Finder, choose Finder → Services from the menu bar and choose one of the two options. Note this is quickly accessed in the contextual menu. This causes a Terminal window or tab to open, rooted at the folder you chose.

You’ll note that one of the commands has a keyboard shortcut. You can set this up in System Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts → Services

Tip #2

If you’re drag-n-drop oriented, you can drag any folder into an open Terminal window and the path will get pasted in. If your goal is to …

READ MORE

The three different clipboards

The three different clipboards

When you use Copy (⌘C), the selected content is written to the system clipboard (aka clipboard), replacing what was already there. This is great until you find you really need to carry more bits of data around. Turns out that macOS actually has two additional clipboards:

  • Dragging clipboard
  • Selection clipboard

Here are scenarios where each of these pasteboards could be very handy.

Dragging Pasteboard

Here’s how you can juggle two items of data using multiple clipboards.

  • Invoke Copy (⌘C) something to the pasteboard
  • Before pasting, see that you have some content you’d like to copy or move somewhere else in the document
  • Select the text and drag or option-drag (for copy) to a new location
  • Paste the test from the System Clipboard somewhere else

Drag-and-drop is a great way to accomplish what could also be done with Cut/Copy/Paste without overwriting the system clipboard.

Selection Pasteboard

Here’s a great way …

READ MORE

fish, an alternative to bash

fish, an alternative to bash

The shells you hear about the most, like bash, tcsh, and zsh aren’t the only shells out there. For about 5 years, I’ve used a shell called fish. While the community of people using it is quite small, it’s a passionate group and the shell has some features you’ll wonder how you lived without.

You can download it here.

Fish shell

The cheeky headline on the pages pokes fun at other shells. The documentation is excellent and worth perusing.

I like to describe it as the Apple of shells. Even though it’s possible to get many fish features in other shells, it typically involves many trips to Stack Overflow or borrowing people’s shell files. The fish shell tends to make these the default or make it easier to set them up.

Advantages

  • Many of the common things people want are enabled by default, like case-insensitive completion on the command-line
  • Tab-completion
…

READ MORE