Control MarsEdit with the Keyboard

I have recently been liking posting with ecto less and less, and a glitch in the application that caused me to lose an entire nearly finished 300+ word post on some features in Aperture pushed me to purchase MarsEdit to replace ecto for posting to MacTips. Not only do I enjoy using MarsEdit more than ecto, it fits better into my general Mac workflow, as it is closer to OS X’s natural UI.

One nice thing I’ve observed in MarsEdit is that you can control MarsEdit’s main window very intuitively and easily with the keyboard. Pressing Tab allows you to navigate through the window’s three main sections–the post list, the post preview pane, and the blog list, as well as the search bar in the top bar, if you have it activated. There are two other parts to MarsEdit’s keyboard functionality, although those are one’s more common to OS X applications

The first is a pretty obvious one–you can use the arrow keys to scroll through the preview post, or to select items in the blog list or post list.

The second is also quite intuitive–to open a post while in the post list, simply select it and press Return.

Although none of these three small tips do very much alone, when they are used together, navigating MarsEdit with solely the keyboard becomes quite easy.