Tech Reflect

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.

1. Dock springing. If you drag a file and hover over Dock items, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. Note you have to have springing ON in Finder Preferences (or use spacebar).
   • If it’s a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock.
   • If it’s a folder/stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens.
   • If it’s the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn’t exist already.
   • The coolest springing trick is if you hover over an application while dragging a file The application comes to the foreground and then you can hover over the window you want and that springs to

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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 to illustrate:

• Does diatomaceous earth kill aspergillus (normal search)
• Does diatomaceous earth kill +aspergillus (the word “aspergillosis” is required in search results)
• Does diatomaceous earth kill aspergillus -bacteria (same search but exclude pages with the word “bacteria” on them)

In June of 2011, Google launched Google Plus. In October, they removed the (+) symbol as a search modifier so that it could be used for Google Plus.

However, I recently discovered that it’s been replaced by using double quotes! When you quote a word or phrase, it not only searches for that word or phrase, but it mandates that it … READ THE REST

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 when you want to remove a few components from the end of a path.

In Terminal, however, this is not possible by default. You can enable a command in the Edit menu called “Use Option as Meta Key” and it will restore this Cocoa editing behavior.

You can also enable it on a per-theme basis in the Keyboard tab.I find this incredibly useful in quite a few scenarios.

• You make a typo and it’s just quicker to do option-delete and retype the word
• You’re typing a command and you’ve messed up the flags or perhaps the ordering of

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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.

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	Selects upper left item in the grid
Shift-Tab or Left Arrow	Selects “Show in Finder” which is the lower right item in the grid
Tab, Shift-Tab, and arrow keys	Navigate between items
Commmand-UpArrow	Navigate up to parent folder
Command-DownArrow	Navigate into selected folder
Space bar	Quick Look selected item
Command-Return	Reveal selected item in the Finder
Type characters	Select matching item

Some other interesting commands not related to keyboard navigation

Action	Result
Option-click file	Open file and leave stack open
Command-Shift-Plus/Minus	Increase/Decrease icon size
Command-click on stack or stack item	Reveal clicked on item in Finder
Option-Command-click on stack	Reveal

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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 will write about later.

Much of the time that hot corners are activated inadvertently, you are trying to reach a menu at the left or right edge of the menu bar and you accidentally end up in the corner. One thing you can do is adjust the delay before hot corners are activated:

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-corner-action-delay -float 0.5

killall Dock

The delay is in seconds. To reverse it:

defaults delete com.apple.dock wvous-corner-action-delay

killall Dock

With a 0.5 second delay, you might find that it’s hard to accidentally trigger them if you are hunting for a menu, but not too long as to be annoying. Play with the number and see what you think.

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

To reverse it:

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture include-date

Now, you’ll get screenshots named like this:

If you want to go full-on retro, you can also change the name used for screenshots:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name Picture

To reverse it:

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture name

This should bring back some memories:

Also, if you’re in the habit of collecting screenshots on one machine, I find naming screenshots after individual machines to be very useful.

People seem to ignore the Help menu, especially more advanced users. However, I’ll often see users of complex applications spend an inordinate amount of time hunting through menus and submenus looking for a particular option. Perhaps you want to know if there’s a keyboard shortcut for a command.

Let’s take a complex application like Pixelmator Pro. You want to add a mask to your document. You look in Insert, then Tools, and then Format and you finally find it in a submenu.

A simpler approach would be to open the Help menu and enter “mask” into the text field.

Hovering over any of the results will open the menu and highlight the menu item. Hitting Return will execute the menu command.

Note that Pixelmator has excellent help, but most applications don’t, so this can be every more valuable.