In my last years at Apple, if I had no workflow in place, it was not impossible to get over a thousand emails a day. When I would visit people’s offices, I would see two main workflows:
I ran across a list of tips I wrote when Leopard shipped a million years ago. Most of them still work and are useful. And best of all, I’ve found that most people are unaware that they exist.
Many years ago, search engines supported using a (+) symbol next to terms that you definitely want to be on the resulting pages. This is similar to how using the (-) symbol before a term omits pages that contain that term.
I’ll use a search string I was using recently …
In pretty much any Cocoa app, option-delete is an incredibly useful shortcut to delete the previous word or path component. If you mess up typing a word, for example, you can start fresh instead of having to use the mouse/trackpad or hit backspace multiple times. For paths, it’s great for …
In case you’re not familiar with App Switcher, press Command-Tab to bring it up
From there, you can continue to Tab until you reach the app you want to switch to and then release. But there are some pretty advanced things you can do.
If you use the defaults command to set preferences, it’s easy to forget that you ever did. Some implications of this:
Note: For most of these keyboard commands, your stack must be in Grid View. Right-click on a Dock stack and choose View content as Grid. A small subset of the commands work in List View and Fan View.
Keyboard navigation commands
| Action | Result |
| Tab or Right Arrow |
Hot corners is a great feature, but can also be frustrating as you can have a lot of accidental activations. There are two strategies for dealing with this, one of which I wrote about later in Hot corners + modifiers.
Much of the time that hot corners are activated …
Currently if you take a screenshot, it gets a name like this:
Personally, I feel the date and time are redundant given you can already sort files by date in the Finder and in Dock folders. So you can omit the date like this:
…defaults write com.apple.screencapture include-date -bool false
One of the (few) nice things about a shell script is that if you share it with someone, they can look at the source code and see how it works or modify it for their own purposes.
It’s not as quick and dirty as a bash script, for example, but …