Here are two handy tips for working in text editors, guaranteed to increase your productivity.

Lewis writes:

Holding alt whilst dragging in the mouse in a cocoa text editor will change the cursor to a crosshair and allow you to ‘block’ select text in a square. This is particularly useful when working with tabular data.

As Lewis notes, this is a handy tip when working with tabular data and also when removing the first a column of characters in a text block.

This works in most text applications, including TextEdit and Word. Unfortunately there are some other text editors that don’t seem to support this, like ecto and TextMate (Update: It looks like in TextMate you press ALT once. Thanks everyone!).

This is what selecting columns of text looks like:

Another useful way to work with text is by increasing or decreasing the indentation.

In many OS X text fields you can change this by pressing either:

• Command+] and Command+[ or
• Tab and Shift+Tab.

The tab version is fairly obvious but the Command+] is more subtle.

What are your tips for working with text fields?

Either reply in the comments or submit a tip and get some traffic to your site.

An easy way to change the default application for a file is to right click (Control+Click) a file and hold option while selecting an application from the “Always Open With” menu.

Please note this only changes the default application for that one file–not every file with this type. See our other post for assigning default applications.

I apologize for the lack of posting lately. Please bear with us–more content coming soon.

While I was trying to fix a different problem, I stumbled upon a keyboard shortcut that brings up the sound preference pane. Just hit Option+F5. From here, you can adjust the volume of your sound alerts, system output volume and microphone input volume.

There’s usually more than one way to complete a task, there’s the fast way, and the slow way. The slow way to crop a photo from the internet would be to save it to your Downloads folder, open it in preview, then crop it.

The fast way is to hit Shift+Command+4 and take a screenshot of only the section of the picture that you need.

The Dock is the primary method for launching applications in OS X. For me, Quicksilver replaces a lot of what I would normally do with the Dock, but I still find it to be an essential tool for my application needs.

By default, the Dock appears at the bottom of the screen. However, it can be repositioned to either the left or right sides of the screen. To do this, one would usually launch System Preferences from their Applications folder, select the Dock pane, and set the position to either left, bottom, or right. Another common method is to Control-Click on the divider used to resize the Dock, go to “Position,” and select whichever position you want.

MacTips user Alex Hwang submitted an alternative way to move the Dock around. Hold down Shift and then click on the divider and drag the divider across the screen. When you get near the left side, the bottom, or the right side of the screen, the Dock will pop into place there. This is much more convenient than going through a bunch of menus.

We have written many more tips on how to manipulate and customize the Dock to fit your needs and wishes. One of my favorites is a Terminal script for switching Leopard’s “shelf” dock back to a more traditional style. You can find everything else we’ve written about the Dock here.

Thanks to Alex Hwang for submitting this shortcut! Submit a tip to MacTips and maybe we will put it up!

The number of possible data fields in Address Book often seems endless. Everything from addresses and instant messenger screen names to the names of a contact’s brother or assistant are possible. One of the fields that I have only recently started playing around with is the Related Names field. This field allows you to link contacts together based on their relationships. You can add as many related names as you want to a contact. Once you have added a related name, you can open the related contact’s card by clicking on the field descriptor to the left of their name and selecting “Show [Name].”

While most features in any Apple program work completely intuitively and intelligently, one part of the Related Names field is not. It is actually quite stupid. If you want to set up a relationship like husband and wife or mother and child, you have to manually edit both of the contacts and set up the Related Names field! This flaw really cripples this feature in Address Book, but luckily, tl.software has a great freeware plug-in for the application that solves the issue.

This plug-in is Relationship Completer, a great tool that does exactly what it says: it completes relationships. Once you install Relationship Completer by placing the plug-in file in ~/Library/Address Book Plug-ins and restarting Address Book, the plug-in will add another item to the contextual menu that pops up when you click on the field title to the left of the related name. Clicking the new item will add automate adding the Related Names field to the related contact in the appropriate format (brother to sibling, father to child, spouse to spouse). Hopefully OS X 10.6 or OS 11 will include an improved Address Book which automatically does this, but Relationship Completer is the best solution at the moment.

I have always been a big fan of Address Book and all its related plug-ins. Most of its features and a handful of plug-ins were covered in Get the Most Out of Address Book, and we also have a few articles on integrating Address Book with Mutt and with Adium. Hawk Wings also has a large archive of Address Book tips worth looking at. (That’s where I found Relationship Completer!)

[Via Hawk Wings]

Notice something different about the above, Safari menu bar? If you look in between Bookmarks and Window, you’ll see a menu that most of you, probably don’t have. It’s called Develop and in my opinion, it’s one of the coolest features that Safari has.

In order to activate this menu, hit command + , to bring up Safari’s preferences. Then click on the Advanced tab and click the checkbox next to “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. This activates the Develop menu and when you click it, you are presented with the menu below.

This little menu is neat for a lot of reasons. First, if you’re stuck on a slow connection, you can choose to browse the web without bandwidth-hogging images. Also, if you’re attempting to read a site which has annoying text styles, you now have the option of disabling them. My favorite part about this menu, however, is the ability to emulate other browsers by clicking User Agent and selecting from a wide variety of browsers ranging from Internet Explorer (shudder) to FIrefox, or Safari for the iPhone (which you can use to take advantage of “free iPhone content”), and everything in between.

Take the following situation into consideration: “We’re sorry but you are using an unsupported browser”. Just a few clicks of your mouse and that problem is solved. In the off chance that this does not work, don’t bother opening up FireFox and pasting the URL; just click Open Page With, and select the required browser.

I’m pleased to announce a new version of the MacTips Widget is available: Download v2.1.

There are some big changes in this version, like:

Smaller Logo and Ability for Widget to Get Much Smaller

Plus you can remove the search bar and post dates. Expect more options here in the future.

Show Only Titles

In addition to shortening articles, you can also show only titles by moving the article length slider (on the back) to zero. This is demonstrated below:

New MacTech Tab

We’ve also added a new MacTech tab for some great Mac news. Also note, using the search on the MacTech tab will also take you to the MacTech’s search engine.

New Back Design

The back has been spruced up a little. and now uses a much smaller image (4KB vs 100KB).

Also added the show search field and show post date fields for customizing the Widget a little more.

Other Small Features

You can scroll with:

• Up/Down Arrow Keys
• Home / End Keys
• Page Up / Down Keys

I will work on more keyboard accessibility issues in the future.

A couple of other smaller bugs were squished.

Let me know if you have any issues by using the contact information on the back of the widget.

Download here.

I’d love to hear any and all feature suggestions. Please send me an e-mail with ideas using the info on the back of the widget.

Enjoy!

Below are 5 user submitted Mac Tips. Submit your own tip and get some traffic to your blog.

5. More Custom Icons

Alex Writes:

I’ve always liked the new Finder, Dashboard and Trash icons float has, but http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1420 has some great Finder icons to spiff up my dock, http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1408 has some gorgeous trash icons, and http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1886 has some very cool dashboard icons.

If you like icons you should also check out these Indiana Jones icons from IconFactory (thanks Pirillo).

View our old post on Using Custom Icons in OS X.

4. Quick Equalizer in iTunes

Alex writes:

I found out that clicking the play button in iTunes a little bit to the left of the main thing on the top with the time and the Song name and the artist shows a cool sound thingy with the audio being measured.

3. Freeze a Window While Minimizing

We’ve talked about using slow motion while minimizing before. This builds on that by killing the dock in the middle of minimizing and making the window get stuck in this state.

shpountik writes:

You can make any window curve. To do this you should enter the following command in Terminal:

$ killall Dock

while minimizing this window (with Shift pressed).

View the video below for the effect (e-mail RSS click the title to see):

While this isn’t entirely useful it’s a neat trick.

2. Take Screenshots of DVD’s

Ductapeinnovations writes:

To take a screenshot with DVD player open, use the terminal. Just type in

screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png

Of course replace dvd.png with the desired filename and Desktopwith the desired folder. For more info: Random Tech.

The complete steps are:

1. In Terminal type: screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png
2. Control+Tab to DVD
3. Use cursor to select DVD picture
4. Open dvd.png on your desktop

This is a good tip, but an even easier method I think is using VLC. It’s the best video player on any platform. It will play anything and it doesn’t have restrictions on taking screenshots of videos. Oh, and it’s free.

1. More Finder Shortcuts

Robby writes:

Two other ⌥-⌘-mouse click keyboard shortcuts for OS X exist that I’m aware of besides the one you wrote about on May 15th - click on a Dock Icon to hide all other applications.

1. ⌥-⌘-click on the Toolbar Button in a Finder window with the Toolbar showing to get the Customize Toolbar dialog box. ⌘-click on it cycles you through the different Toolbar views.

2. ⌥-⌘-double-click on a file name in a Finder window closes that window and opens the file in a new window.

I was able to get the second one working, but not the first one. Anybody else?

The second one is great for keeping your Finder windows in order.

Submit a Mac Tip

I thought it would be interesting to list multiple user submitted tips in one entry instead of many smaller entries.

What are your thoughts on this method?

Submit a Mac Tip and get some traffic to your blog–or just help contribute to the community!

The System Preferences panel has many overlooked settings. Here are my favorite 5.

5. Smooth Scrolling

One small but important feature I found inside System Preferences -> Appearance is called Use smooth scrolling.

Enabling smooth scrolling makes the page glide up and down the screen without any rigidness.

This only applies when using the page up/down, spacebar and home/end keys while navigating a page.

The difference here is subtle, but I’m a fan. I often use the spacebar while reading news feeds and it’s made the experience surprisingly better.

4. Great Screensavers Custom & Built-in

OS X has some great screensavers built right in. There’s the standard Flurry screensaver:

But there’s also iTunes Artwork, RSS Visualizer and Word of the Day:

Leopard added Arabesque, a vibrant grid of blurring dots, to the collection:

But you can also use custom screensavers. Apple also has a good variety of these, along with Google.

One really cool screensaver I found is called Lotsawater. It renders a cool water effect over your desktop:

3. Easily Search and Find

This isn’t so much a preference as it is a feature of System Preferences.

Finding preferences is extremely easy–even if you don’t know where to look.

The search box knows all of the options inside the panels, and will take you to the correct place when you hit enter.

2. Customize Default Alert Sound Effect

I wish I would have thought about customizing this setting sooner. The default Funk sound effect that plays as an alert is downright terrible compared to Morse.

There are a dozen alert sounds, so I suggest finding the one that best fits you inside System Preferences -> Sound -> Sound Effects.

1. Customizing Global Keyboard Shortcuts

Inside System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts you will find a list of global keyboard shortcuts you may want to change or disable entirely.

For example I find it annoying to have Front Row set to Command+Escape. Sometimes while pressing Command+` I slip and Front Row pops up and completely interrupts my workflow.

The solution here is either changing or disabling the Front Row keyboard shortcut.

You can set many other keyboard shortcuts here, including:

• Look up in dictionary shortcut
• Take Screenshot with your keyboard
• Super Zoom
• Invert screen colors
• and many more…