I have sometimes no alternatives but using Mac/Intel computers. In this page, I try to list some random tricks to make them somehow more usable.
A table with more shortcuts than I could
ever know:
http://homepage.mac.com/frakes/MOSXPT/content/keyboard.html
However, below are some shortcuts which seem
to miss in this table.
System Preferences/Displays.
System Preferences/Sound.
A table of symbols used to pretty-print hotkeys in
Mac OS X:
http://images.apple.com/education/accessibility/technology/pdf/symbols.pdf
I began to write a table with Unicode code point but
such tables have already been done
elsewhere.
Besides some symbols (the upwards white arrow ⇧ for example)
seems to be not rendered properly, sometimes, with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Mac OS X
Tiger but I always see them perfectly on Safari... or with Firefox on Ubuntu!
Symbol | Unicode code point | Key |
---|---|---|
⌥ | U+2325 OPTION KEY | Option key (alt) |
⌘ | U+2318 PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN | Command key (Apple key) |
⌃ | U+2303 UP ARROWHEAD | Control key |
⇧ | U+21E7 UPWARDS WHITE ARROW | Shift |
↩ | U+2305 LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH HOOK | Return |
⌅ | U+2305 PROJECTIVE | Enter |
⌫ | U+232B ERASE TO THE LEFT | Backspace |
⎋ | U+238B BROKEN CIRCLE WITH NORTHWEST ARROW | Escape key |
An article to set up decent keybindings
for Cocoa text fields:
Customize the Cocoa text binding system
Playing with Cocoa keybindings customization
capabilities this article describes, I
wrote a small
Perl script which acts as a filter from Unix
Compose files supplied on standard input
to Cocoa KeyBindings
plist returned on standard output. The key
which Compose is mapped to is hard-coded in a variable
at the beginning of the script; by default, the Enter
key (⌅) is used. It
could be more usefull to produce new keymaps to
target non-Cocoa applications as well, but that will be
for another day!
Each job scheduled by launchd is defined in a plist. Parameters of such plist are documented in the launchd.plist(5) man page. To create a new job my_new_job.plist in the current directory:
By default, only regular sleep (suspend-to-ram) was enabled in the version of the MacBook I use. Two command-lines to enable safe-sleep (traditionally referred as suspend-to-disk or hibernation):
Changes are applied after rebooting. The hibernatemode option in power management settings selects the suspend policy:
The following applescript puts the mac to sleep: tell application "System Events" to sleep. The sleep command turns out to be in the Finder's dictionary too.
cdrtools is packaged in MacPorts. My Mac automatically mounts CD-roms as soon as I insert them: I unmount them with a diskutil unmount /dev/disk1. According to this site, IOCompactDiscServices or IODVDServices may be used whether the Mac has got a mere CD-Rom drive or a CD/DVD combo-drive. Therefore I put:
in /etc/default/cdrecord file.