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.)