See the path to where you are in the Finder window’s title bar: defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES. Via TUAW
A great iPhone tip from Bonaldi: Set Safari to about:blank and save as homescreen bookmark. No more waiting for it to gather its wits and reload some old fat tab.
I use screen a lot, but always forget how to force it to detach a screen then reattach (when, say, I’ve moved from one computer to another without remembering to detach): screen -D -r [name of your screen]
To get a grave accent on a Mac running OS X, press Option + `, then the letter you want to accentify. I’m hoping that by writing this here I’ll finally wodge the technique into my brain.
« »Find out what you’ve been up to lately: history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head
You can burn a .iso image to a CD from the command line like so: hdiutil burn yourimage.iso. So much less faff than Disk Utility it’s unbelievable.
In 10.5.2, you can fix the annoyingly app-centric way Spaces works:
defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO
From Mac OS X Hints.
« »gilest explains how to stream the mighty Speechification weblog with Easy Listener. Brill.
« »I e-mail scanned copies of my passport, drivers licence, tickets, travel insurance etc to a webmail and keep them there for the duration of any holiday–a good tip from Niel1952.
« »To see an email attachment in QuickView, er, quickly, just hit Command+Y.
To get rid of the silly glass Dock in Leopard, do defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES, then do killall Dock. (If you want it back, do the same again, but with NO instead of YES.)
Timed reminders in Quicksilver:
TabCtrl+EnterdelayTab10mAdapted form this post at Mac OSX Hints
# quicksilver, reminder, timer
When enjoying the mysterious magic of Quicksilver, you don’t need to hit enter when launching an application: just keep holding down the key (or the last letter of the key combination) that you use to access it. Via the always-fabulous Hawk Wings
« »To control the menu bar with your keyboard, hit Command+F1 to turn on Full Keyboard Access, then use Command+F2 to highlight the menu bar. It only works on the left-hand side, so no access to your menu bar widgets, sadly.
« »If you want OS X applications to check your spelling against a proper English dictionary, rather than an American English one: hit Command+Shift+: then select ‘British English’ in the ‘Dictionary’ dropdown menu. (Nota bene: you need to do this in every application in which you employ the spelling checker.) Thank you codeman38.
« »If you suddenly realise that a tiny resistor for the circuit you’re about to put together has disappeared, it is definitely worth checking the turn-ups of your jeans.
« »Syncing of a sort for Google Calendar:
What is on your USB memory stick? | Ask MetaFilter. Hogshead answers: First thing I do with a new USB stick (or Flash memory card of any kind) is rename the drive to my mobile phone number, and create a text file with my contact information called REWARD IF FOUND.TXT.
« »In TextEdit, and other Cocoa apps, when editing a rich-text document, you can trigger a very basic outliner mode by hitting Option+Tab. Handy for taking notes with a bit of structure. (via Daring Fireball)
« »Move windows in OS X without changing focus: hold down the Command key, then drag the titlebar of an unfocused window. (Nicked from Projectionist: A tumblelog)
« »If you unmount your external hard drive from time to time, rather than unplugging it and plugging it in again, you can do something like this: when the drive is mounted, do disktool -l and make a note of the number of your drive (probably something like disk1s9), then, when you need to mount it again, just do disktool -m disk1s9. (Probably very obvious, but I didn’t know about disktool until just now…)
sips is a handy image-manipulation command line thingy. For example, to rotate an image 90° clockwise, open up the Terminal and type sips -r 90 thenameofyourfile.jpg. Much quicker than opening up a proper graphics application (and much better than using Preview, which I tend to do, only to kick myself when I remember it alters the EXIF orientation tag for the file, not the file itself). Meta-tip for non command liners: type sips --help for, um, help using sips.
# images, manipulation, rotate
A useful little habit: when writing, select all your text and copy it to the clipboard at frequent intervals, before you hit save (which if you’re as paranoid as I am, is every few lines). This gives you an easily accessible revision history, especially if you use a utility like Jumpcut, and lets you pause for a microsecond to gather your thoughts.
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