Deleting songs from your iTunes library is usually very easy. You can either select a song, Control-Click on it and then select “Delete”, or you can simply press Delete from the keyboard, and iTunes will bring up a little window asking if you are sure that you “want to remove the selected song from your iTunes library.” (Seen below.) Select “Remove,” and iTunes brings up another window asking if you want to keep the file in the iTunes Music folder or to move it to the trash. Answer iTunes, and you are done deleting the song from your iTunes Music library. However, this method only works while browsing within the main iTunes library, and not while viewing a song from within a playlist.

Following the first steps of removing a song from your iTunes library while in a playlist leads to a prompt that asks if you want to remove the song from the playlist, not the library. (Seen below.) In order to actually remove the song from the entire library while viewing it from the playlist, press Option-Delete instead of just Delete, and you will get the same prompt as from before in the library! (Seen above.)

View more iTunes Tips.

Mutt is one of the best email clients out there, it’s fast, efficient, you can keep your fingers on the keyboard, it has key bindings and macros, threading, regular expression, pattern matching and more.

With a little tweaking you can get Mutt to also integrate into the Mac environment, for example here’s how you can get Mutt to use your contacts in your Address Book:

1. Install the Little Brother’s Database (lbdb) (we’re gonna use MacPorts, if you haven’t installed it first do that) and do the command:
   sudo port install lbdb
2. Modify the lbdb’s configuration so that it uses the Address Book by opening the lbdb.rc file in /opt/local/etc/ and change the following lines: (line 43) # METHODS="m_inmail m_passwd m_finger" To this:
   METHODS="m_muttalias m_osx_addressbook"
   and uncomment (delete the # on the beginning of the line) the following lines (68-69):
   #MUTT_DIRECTORY="$HOME/.mutt"
#MUTTALIAS_FILES=”.muttrc .mail_aliases muttrc aliases”
3. Modify Mutt’s configuration:
   open your ~/.muttrc file and in it put:
   set query_command ="/opt/local/bin/lbdbq '%s'"

And you’re done, restart Mutt, compose a new email, start to type the first characters of a contact’s name or email address and press Command-T, select a contact and continue your email.

[Via:macosxhints.com(modified to work with lbdb MacPort)]

Adium must be the most customizable chat application in the world. It’s options are so numerous that I discover new ones nearly every day. One of the features that I have most recently discovered involve the organization of contacts who are not in their “available” state, those who are either offline, idle, or mobile.

There are two main ways to deal with offline contacts. The first is to hide them, and the second is to give them their own group. By default, Adium leaves offline contacts hidden. To give them their own group, simply select View from the menu bar and click on “Show Offline Group.” Adium immediately creates a new folder titled “Offline” for any contact who is not online.

If you are not a fan of a separate group for offline contacts, Adium’s contact-hiding features are quite robust. From View in the menu bar, you can select to “Hide Certain Contacts.” Alternatively, you can press Command-Shift-H. Now that Adium is hiding “certain” contacts, you need to define what you mean by “certain.” Go back to View, and just under “Hide Certain Contacts,” select whether offline contacts, idle contacts, and mobile contacts fall under your hidden criteria, and the “Hide Certain Contacts” feature will adapt to your needs!

If after all this you still need more customization, take a look at Adium’s “Configure Status Sort” feature, which is “unlocked” by selecting “Sort Contacts by Status” from the View menu and then selecting “Configure Status Sort.”

For Emacs users on Linux one of the most efficient and important things to
do is remap your Control Key to your Caps Lock key. This is because the Caps
Lock key has such a prominent position on the home row and yet it is rarely
used compared to the Control key.

On Linux you can change your xmodmap, on Windows it’s even trickier,
however on the Mac is only takes a few clicks.

1. Open up your System & Preferences
2. Go to Keyboard and Mouse
3. Click on the Keyboard tab
4. On the bottom left corner click on “Modifier Keys…”
5. Change the Caps Lock Key to the Control key and the Caps Lock key for the Control Key.

And you’re done, now it’s much easier to use your Control key. It’s even smart , the light on the Caps Lock key will light up only when you hit the newly remapped key for Caps Lock and not the traditional one. Unfortunately
for the Vim users there doesn’t seem to be a way to move your Esc key to the
Caps Lock right so we’ll just have to live it or find some other way.

Whenever you choose “Save File As…”(or Link As… and so forth) in Safari it opens the typical window that allows you to choose whatever folder to want to save the file by mouse. However often I want to save an Emacs or Vim configuration or script to their respected hidden folders (~/.emacs.d or ~/.vim) and you can’t choose a hidden folder by default.

The inefficient way is to just download the file to some visible folder and then either move the file in the finder or use the mv command in the terminal. The efficient and smart way is to go to the “Save File As…” window in Safari and do Command-Shift-G. The window below will come up:

Now you put in the folder that you want, for example I would put in ~/.emacs.d and it would come up and I can choose so save my file in the hidden folder.

Enjoy!

As I’ve mentioned before, Address Book is filled with useful tricks. One of these is a feature that allows you to take any contact and find which group or groups they are a member of. Simply select a contact in Address Book and press Option. Every group which they are a member of will be highlighted in yellow, as seen below.

This trick also works for multiple contacts. If you select two or more contacts and press Option, Address Book will highlight all the groups which all of the selected contacts are members of.

This trick also works with Smart Groups, and regardless of whether the card or cards being checked are people or companies.

Apple’s Pages is a seriously underrated word processor application. Ever since being nearly completely redone for iWork ‘08, Pages has been at the same level as Microsoft Word 2004 on almost every level (I don’t have much experience with Office 2008 yet, but Office 2004 is more of a currently accepted standard office suite for OS X). However, unlike Word 2004, Pages is a real Mac application. It runs perfectly on Intel machines, it integrates with your OS X workflow, and does things like you expect it to.

Although Microsoft Word is a much more developed application, as it has been in development for many years, while iWork has only been around for a couple, Pages has quite a few of its own tricks. One of my favorite examples of this is how Pages works with multiple pages in a document. Pages has a few efficient and intuitive methods to switch from one page to another.

The first of these ways is two small arrows appearing at the bottom of every document. Once a document contains more than one page, either one or both of the arrows will turn blue (depending on your location in the document). The buttons work as intuitively as things get–press the arrow pointing up to go one page up, and press the arrow pointing down to go one page down.

The next method to switch between pages is found right next to the two arrows. Look to the left, where some text is located that should say “Page # of #”. At first this appears to just be a great way to keep track of which page the document is opened to, but upon further inspection, this is an ingenious feature that most developers could not come up with. Click on the text, and a new feature will magically appear. You are prompted for a page number, and when you enter it and press Return, Pages directs you straight to that page!

The third method for page navigation is one commonly found in OS X applications. It is simply a page thumbnail pane on the left side, activated by either typing Option-Command-P or selecting View from the menu bar, and then pressing Show Page Thumbnails. Simply clicking on a page thumbnail will prompt Pages to scroll to that page. Alternatively, you can navigate page by page with the up and down arrow keys once you bring OS X’s focus to the thumbnail pane by clicking anywhere in it.

As you’ve seen, like most other Apple-branded OS X applications, Pages takes fine attention to detail. Every little thing seems to be thoroughly thought out, resulting in an excellent and affordable word processor.

NewsFire, NetNewsWire and Vienna have been the three biggest and best RSS readers on the Mac or even any platform. NetNewsWire almost two months ago announced that it was going to be free thereon, Vienna is open source and has always been free, and in its latest release NewsFire joins them in becoming free as well.

NewsFire features a beautiful, clean, and simple interface, as shown below:

However it doesn’t have the keyboard navigation ability that both Vienna and NetNewsWire have, but if you mainly navigate with the mouse then you won’t have a problem.

Here’s where you can get.

Apple Mail is one of the better desktop email clients I have worked with. It rarely feels bloated, works well with other OS X applications, and has many features not available on most web clients. One great thing in Mail is the ability to be very specific with the format of text, from font and text size to indentations and quote levels.

Mail’s behavior towards quoted text is often confusing, but a couple of keyboard shortcuts make it very easy to take care of. To “raise” the quote level of text, press Command-’ (apostrophe). To lower the quote level, press Option-Command-’ (apostrophe). Alternatively, you can select either of these from the menu bar by selecting Format and then Quote Level. These simple (and intuitive) commands make dealing with replies and forwarded emails a delight. A good trick to remembering the shortcuts is to remember that you are simply pressing Command and the button you use to signify quotes in general text.

MarsEdit is one of the top desktop blogging clients available on OS X. One of the main points that sets MarsEdit apart from other editors such as ecto is that it relies solely on HTML coding; there is no WYSIWYG editor. While this may scare some users, others love it because it prevents the commonly poor and ineffective code that WYSIWYG editors often force on users.

However, users of MarsEdit do not really need to be familiar with HTML coding to work with it. MarsEdit has various tricks to keep non-HTML-savvy users satisfied. There is a convenient “Text Markup” tool available, as well as some useful shortcuts.

One of my favorite ways in which MarsEdit makes coding in HTML easier for beginners is a keyboard shortcut for entering “br” tags. Simply press Command-Return, and MarsEdit will create a “br” tag for you to ensure web browsers will understand your line breaks.