In terminal on Mac OS X you can press the UP Arrow to cycle through your previously used commands.
This quick hack will make it so you can type part of a command first and then press the UP Arrow to cycle through only the commands that match what you typed. Way more useful!
Make a text file called .inputrc with the following 4 lines and save it in your home folder (~/). Then just re-launch Terminal and happy typing!
“\e[A”: history-search-backward
“\e[B”: history-search-forward
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on
In most Mac applications you can “zoom” your window or document to make it’s contents larger or smaller on the screen. This is super helpful when you want look more closely at something or even present content on a TV/Projector for others to see and fill the screen. You can usually look under the “Window” or “View” menu to see if zoom options exist for that app.
I see a lot of people do this on accident too in their browsers and not realize why their pages look so strange. So here are the zoom commands for your web browsers to help you out the next time you find yourself in need of making something bigger or smaller.
- Command & + will make window/document content larger
- Command & - will make window/document content smaller
- Command & 0 will always return to the default size
Being in IT I get a LOT of boxes each week. I do my best to recycle all the boxes and packaging appropriately and I am always amazed at how bad some companies are like CDW or Amazon at wasting packaging materials (do I really need all that padding for diapers?).
I am also very aware at how bad some individuals are about recycling and many areas in the country that don’t even have the option. So to help with this problem there is certainly work to be done by both the retailers and the customers. But I had an idea which probably exists already but I am to lazy to look.
Please retailer X take this idea and do some good with it.
Why don’t one of you larger shipment based retailers institue a “recycle back” program. The first time I order with you, send me a “recycling box” that has pre-paid return postage. Whenever I have enough of your boxes and packaging material collected from future shipments, I load them all into this pre-paid box and ship them back to you. You can be responsible for recycling the materials correctly and I can get some sort of discount or account credit for my participation.
And now that I sent you that full box, feel free to send me another empty one! I am sure there are a lot of other, better, great ideas out there. But I thought I should write this one down before I forgot it!
One of the many reasons I like to use Google Chrome as my primary browser is because it allows me to reopen tabs I accidentally close! This also is another case for using tabs, instead of windows, when surfing the web!
In the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox you can press Shift & Command & T on your keyboard and reopen the last tab you closed. You can keep doing it over and over and it will continue opening tabs in the order they were closed!
In Safari, you can always use the trusty Command & Z keys (Undo) to reopen a tab if you close it. But alas, you can only do the very last closed tab and only right after you close it.
How many times are you in an application and need to see/grab/drag a file to/from your desktop? Most people I know proceed to dragging tons of windows out of the way so they can “see” their desktop.
There is an easier way! By default, the F11 key on your keyboard will quickly “move away” all windows and show your desktop. Depending on your setup, you may have to also press the Function (fn) key and F11 together.
However I find it easier to use a hot corner! If you open your System Preferences and go to either the “Desktop & Screen Saver” OR “Mission Control” settings, there is a button for Hot Corners where you can assign what happens when you drag your mouse to the corners of your screen.
There are a lot of useful hot corners, but “Desktop” is one of my favorites. I make it my lower right hand hot corner. Example: I am in my email and need to attach a file. I move my mouse to the hot corner to show my desktop. I click and start dragging the file I need and while dragging I put my mouse in the hot corner again which will take me back to my email. But now I have the file being dragged so I can drop it on my email to attach!
Sounds complicated, but in practice, it is very fast and much easier than clicking through lots of windows to find your desktop!!
The “color picker” window in many Mac OS X applications has two pretty neat features to help you both match colors and save them to reuse later and across applications. These tips are super useful in programs like Keynote where you are working with a lot of text or shapes that need to match colors across multiple slides.
Matching colors:
Ever need to match a color for some text or an object? If you click the magnifying glass in the color picker window, you can hover over anything on your screen and click to select that color! Your color will show up in the rectangular box at the top.
Saving colors:
Ever notice the small squares at the bottom of the color picker window? Those are there so you can save colors to reuse later. Once you select a color and it shows up in the rectangular box at the top, drag that rectangle to one of the empty squares at the bottom to save it. Now you can recall that color whenever you like by clicking on the square!
OS X 10.7 and up gained a neat little carry over feature from IOS to let you quickly type accent characters.
On many keyboard keys such as the letter E, if you just press and hold the key down, you will get a list of accent choices.
Super quick and easy, and you can even press number keys that correspond to each choice! And just press the escape key to cancel if you change your mind.
On most browsers on a mac you can use the Command key and a number key to switch between open tabs in your browser.
So if you keep your email open in the first tab all the time, you can always press Command & 1 to get back to it quickly (even if it’s pinned)!
The one exception is that Command & 9 takes you to the “last” tab to the right regardless of if you have more/less than 9 tabs.
One of the fastest ways to get to some of your System Preferences is to hold the Option key and press one of the F-keys on your keyboard.
For example, hold Option and then press your Volume Up or Down buttons to open the Sound system preferences.
This is especially handy for things like quickly changing sound input/output or display settings when using multiple screens.
I often, accidentally, resize the text on my web page. This is particularly annoying when you are in an application like Gmail and it becomes un-readable. Here are some helpful key commands to help in most browsers.
- Command & + will increase font size.
- Command & - will decrease font size.
- Command & 0 (zero) will reset your font size back to standard!
MacTip