AVetter

In the last few months I had to setup some new macBooks and iMacs for my friends. All of them are new in the mac world and this brought me up to write a little article about some useful keyboard shortcuts and about some utilities.

First of all I want to start with the shortcuts, because in my opinion it makes you much faster to walk through your system only with the keyboard. However a lot of persons don’t always agree. Like every time in your life it’s the best thing to try it out and decide for yourself. You can only disagree if you tried it out….

cmd is the same as the “apple” key.

• Eject CD:
  • F12 (to eject a cd at boottime)
  • eject-button
  • cmd + e (also to unmount a selected disk)
• Search (is not only to search for a string, but also to run a application e.g. “Firefox” and than press enter):
  • cmd + space (in the right corner a small window pops up for the search string (spotlight))
  • shift + cmd + space (only if quicksilver is installed)
• Firefox:
  • cmd + l (to jump into the url field)
  • cmd + k (to jump into the search field)
  • ctrl + tab (switch between tabs)
  • cmd + t (create new emtpy tab)
  • cmd + n (create new window)

Finally I give you a list of useful tools to work with the osx.

• Quicksilver (Search machine)
• iGTD (Getting things done)
• Firefox (Browser)
• FileZilla (FTP Client)
• Adium (Messenger)
• Skype (Messenger with voice and video)
• Azureus (Filesharing)
• TrueCrypt (Encrypt data to use them under OSX, Linux, Windows)
• GIMP (like PhotoShop but free)