THE BAD KEYBOARD SHORTCUT HALL OF FAME: NEW FOLDERS

THE BAD KEYBOARD SHORTCUT HALL OF FAME: NEW FOLDERS

For about 16 years, the keyboard shortcut for creating a New Folder on a Macintosh was Command-N (and it made perfect sense, because we make so many new folders). Apparently, it was too perfect, because in Mac OS X, Apple changed it. Now, it’s Shift-Command-N. Of all the changes in Mac OS X, this one really just doesn’t make any sense to me. If you forget, and press the old Command-N, you get a new Finder window, which I find about as useful as fish might find a bicycle. If you want to make a Shift-Command-N keyboard shortcut at least marginally helpful, go under Finder and choose Preferences. In the Finder Prefs dialog, click on the General icon at the top and for New Finder Windows Open, choose Home instead of Computer. At least that way, if you press Command-N, your Home Window opens, which you’ll use often. If you prefer it to open something else, other choices include any mounted disk, your iDisk, your Documents folder, any other folder you choose; pretty much everything except a stinkin’ new folder.

SPEED TIP: CREATING NEW FOLDERS

Just Option-Command-click on the little white pill-shaped button in the top right of a window’s title bar to bring up the Customize Toolbar window. Drag the New Folder icon up to your toolbar, and then you’re one click away from a new folder any time you need one.

STOPPING THE SCROLLING BLUES

If you don’t like sliding the scroll bar up and down in your documents, you can turn on a feature called Scroll to Here, which lets you jump to any position in the scroll bar by just clicking on it (rather than using the scroll handles themselves). To turn this on, go under the Apple Menu, under System Preferences, and click on the Appearance icon. When the appearance pane appears, for the setting called Click in the Scroll Bar To, choose Scroll to Here.

ANOTHER ANTI –SCROLL BAR TIP

Speaking of hating to use the scroll bars, you can always use the Page Up/Page Down keys on your keyboard to move up and down, now you don’t have to grab the mouse at all. (Note: If you have a PowerBook, hold the “fn” key and then press the Up Arrow key for Page Up and the Down Arrow key for Page Down.)

TOO MANY ICONS IN YOUR TOOLBAR? SHRINK THEM

TOO MANY ICONS IN YOUR TOOLBAR? SHRINK THEM

The toolbar icons are fairly large, taking up considerable space both vertically and horizontally. If you add a few extra icons to the toolbar, the additional icons could wind up being hidden from view. Well, you have the toolbar display just the icons, which saves space by removing the text and shrinking the space between the icons. To display the toolbar items by icons, rather than by icon and text, Control-click anywhere in the toolbar and choose Icon only. If you really want to shrink the toolbar to its bare minimum, try Text Only. For even more space-saving options, try Command-clicking on the white pill-shaped button in the upper right-hand corner of the Finder window. Each time you click, you get a new space-saving look.

GETTING BACK YOUR TOOLBAR DEFAULTS

If you made a total mess of your toolbar, there’s no button for returning the icons to the default set, but getting them back there is fairly easy. First, Option-Command-click on the white pill-shaped button at the top right of your window’s title bar to bring up the Customize Toolbar dialog. In the bottom left of the Customize Toolbar dialog, you’ll see a set called The Default Set. Drag it to the top of the Finder window and it replaces the current icons in your toolbar.

SPEED TIP: REMOVING TOOLBAR ICONS

To remove an icon from the toolbar, you don’t have to go digging through the View menu to get the Customize Toolbar dialog. Instead, just hold the Command key, click on the icon, and simply drag it off the toolbar. When you release the mouse button, the icon disappears in a puff of smoke.

ONE-CLICK TRAIL TO YOUR LIFE

ONE-CLICK TRAIL TO YOUR LIFE

This one’s a handy holdover from Mac OS 9 (and previous versions of the Mac OS).  If you Command-click directly on a window’s name (at the top center of your window), a pop-up menu appears that shows its folder hierarchy (which folders your current window resides within).

HIDING THE TOOLBAR WHEN YOU DON’T NEED IT

If you don’t want the toolbar showing all the time (or ever for that matter), you can hide it by simply clicking on the white Pill-shaped button on the top right of the window’s title bar (or you can use the keyboard shortcut Option –Command-T).

MOVING YOUR TOOLBAR ICONS AT WILL

If you decide you want to change the order of the icon in your toolbar, hold the Command key and drag them to where you want them.

HOW TO MAKE THE SIDEBAR WORK LIKE THE DOCK

I’ll show you how you can customize the toolbar using the Customize Toolbar command but you can also customize the Sidebar by adding other icons that make it even more powerful.  For example, if you use Photoshop a lot just open the window where your Photoshop application resides, drag the Photoshop icon right over to the Sidebar and the other icons in the Sidebar slide out of the way.  Now, you can use this window kind of like you would the Dock – to launch Photoshop, just click on its icon in the Sidebar, plus like the Dock, you can even drag-and-drop images you want to open right onto the Photoshop icon.

ADDING ITEMS TO THE SIDEBAR

To add a file (folder, or application) to the Sidebar, just click on it and drag it right into the Sidebar (clicking on the file and pressing Command-T also does the trick).  If you drag your file, you’ll see a thin horizontal blue bar (with a blue circle on the end) appear in the Sidebar at the location where your dragged file (folder, etc.) will appear.  If you don’t like the location, drag up/down until it’s where you want, then release the mouse button to drop it into place. If you want to remove an item from the Sidebar just click and drag it off the Sidebar and it will be gone in a puff of smoke.

THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMIZE TOOLBAR SHORTCUT

If you want to customize the items in your toolbar just Option-Command-click the little white pill-shaped button at the top right of your window’s title bar and the Customize Toolbar dialog appears right there in your window.

Mac OS X Shortcut Keys

Newer Mac laptops (MacBook Pros made after February 2008, MacBooks after November(?) 2007, MacBook Airs), and the Aluminum keyboard, have a different layout for fn keys. Some keys have been added, while the numlock key has been removed and the display mode key has been integrated into the brightness key (see combinations in parenthesis)

F1	decrease brightness (command+F1 changes display mode, option+F1 brings up display prefs)
F2	increase brightness (option+F2 brings up display prefs)
F3	exposé (F3 shows all windows, control+F3 shows app windows, option+F3 brings up exposé prefs, command+F3 shows desktop)
F4	dashboard (option+F4 brings up exposé prefs)
F5	decrease keyboard brightness for backlit keyboards (option+F5 brings up keyboard prefs)
F6	increase keyboard brightness for backlit keyboards (option+F6 brings up keyboard prefs)
F7	media navigation backwards (like hitting back on Apple Remote)
F8	media play/pause (like hitting play/pause on Apple Remote)
F9	media navigation forwards (like hitting next on Apple Remote)
F10	mute volume (option+F10 brings up sound prefs)
F11	decrease volume (option+shift+F11 for incremental decrease, option+F11 brings up sound prefs)
F12	increase volume (option+shift+F12 for incremental increase, option+F12 brings up sound prefs)

If you want to use these function keys for standard keyboard shortcuts, you must use the fn key, located in the lower-left corner of the keyboard. For example, to use Spaces on these keyboards, you must press fn-F8; to shift between all open windows in all applications, you must press ctrl-fn-F4; etc.

This behaviour can be altered in the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, so that hardware functions (like screen brightness) require pressing fn, and standard keyboard shortcuts (like Spaces) work without the fn key.

Application specific shortcuts

iPhoto

command-option-backspace	delete pictures from the library from within an album
command-1,2,3,4,5	rate picture

iTunes

command-option-backspace	delete songs from the library from within a playlist
command-B	show browser
command-L	highlight currently playing track
command-shift-R	reveal currently playing track in Finder (was command-R until iTunes 10)

MS Office 2004

Word 2004

Insert Bullet
Clear Formatting	Cntrl + Spacebar

Powerpoint 2004

page down while in normal view, cursor in the slide window (not notes or outline)	next slide
F6/fn-F6	toggle between Slide, Outline, and notes windows
control-shift-S	start slide show from first slide
control-shift-B	start slide show from current slide

Powerpoint 2008

F6/fn-F6 toggle has a bug where it occasionally jumps to the first slide instead of toggling cursor.

Shortcuts on laptops

System startup

Hold down these keys to cause a Mac to perform special actions at startup time.

C	boot from CD or DVD
D	force the boot device to be the internal hard drive
T	start up in FireWire/Thunderbolt target mode (the Mac temporarily becomes a very expensive external FireWire/Thunderbolt drive)
X	force boot into Mac OS X (older Macs that dual-boot into OS 9 and X)
N	boot from Network drive
shift	hold after power-up to boot into safe mode, hold after login to prevent startup items from opening
mouse button	eject CD before booting normally
command-S	boot into single user mode; type exit when done
command-option-O-F	boot into the Open Firmware prompt
command-option-P-R	reset PRAM
command-option-V	verbose boot; show the Unixy text goodness at boot time
command-option-shift-delete	bypass internal hard drive and boot from external drive or CD
option	choose startup disk at boot time
command-.	when startup disk chooser is active, open the CD tray

Customizing shortcuts

Many system-wide shortcuts can be customized. This is described in detail in the Changing Keyboard Shortcuts article.

Shortcuts on laptops

On most Mac laptops, some of the function keys (F1 - F12) are used to control hardware features:

F1	decrease brightness
F2	increase brightness
F3	mute on G4s, decrease volume on G3s
F4	decrease volume on G4s, increase volume on G3s
F5	increase volume on G4s, numlock on G3s
F6	Num lock on G4s, mute on G3s
F7	Display mode (mirror or extend external display)
F8	disable backlit keyboards (Aluminum PowerBooks)
F9	decrease keyboard brightness for backlit keyboards
F10	increase keyboard brightness for backlit keyboards
F12	eject (some Macs, namely all MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and newer PowerBooks, place a dedicated eject key next to the F12 key)