Tips and Tricks

General Tips

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Generally Speaking

Due to the nature and history of the Macintosh operating system (Mac OS), there are a great number of behaviours and actions which are consistent between — and relevant to — many applications from different vendors.

Learning these tricks can help you to become more efficient across the board — even with applications you have never used before.

Beginner

  • Get the hang of keyboard commands. They can save you from having to continually move between the keyboard and mouse.

  • Nearly every menu command has a keyboard equivalent written next to it in the menu. These are composed of the command key (⌘) — found immediately next to the space bar on the keyboard, and another key — possibly including other modifier keys.

  • The keyboard command ⌘N is almost universally adopted to create a new document (where appropriate) or a new basic entity (e.g. a new record in a database, or a new email, address or appointment in relevant applications).

Intermediate

  • If you wish to switch between applications, hold down the command key and while keeping it down push the tab key once. This will bring up a row of icons on the screen (OS X 10.3+) or highlight an icon on the dock (10.2). Each time you push the tab key the next icon will highlight. Let the command key go to switch to that application.

  • Following from above, if you keep the command key down while an application icon is highlighted, you can press the "Q" key to quit that application. Repeatedly pressing "Q" will work through each application quitting them as you go (exception being the Finder).

Advanced

  • There are certain characters — such as é — accessible through the keyboard by holding down the option key (⌥) along with another key. Some combinations bring up an accent to be applied to the next character pressed.

  • Option-clicking on an application icon in the dock will hide that application if it is the currently active one, or hide the current one and bring the clicked one to the front.