Sleep Spent

I discovered a few new bits of polish that I just had to share. First of all, it’s no secret that Open panels in Panther have become more like Finder windows. You can choose different views (via Cmd-2/3), you can use all the same shortcuts (Cmd-Shift-H/A/C), and you even have the same sidebar as a Finder window.

But did you know that my favorite little Finder window hack is also available to Open dialogs? That’s right: Cmd-Shift-G opens a sheet that will let you type in a path! It doesn’t appear to be exactly the same thing because, while the Finder allows you to tab-complete folder names and such, the Open panel does not. No worries, however, as this is very useful in and of itself. Say you were reading a webpage (as I was yesterday) and it suggested to you that you might take a look at some documentation installed with the dev tools on your machine (as it did). You could take the time to navigate to the the folder using the Finder, probably switching back and forth from Safari a few times for a long path, select the item and then Cmd-down. But who wants to do all that? From within Safari:

Triple-click the line and copy it
Hit Cmd-Space (You are running LaunchBar, right?)
Type “tex” and hit enter
When TextEdit opens hit Cmd-O
When the Open panel opens hit Cmd-Shift-G
Paste in the path and hit Return
The folder will be switched to and the correct file selected, so just hit Return again

(You could of course just open it with Vim from Terminal. That would be even faster.)

Wow, how fun was that!? Are you ready for another one? When using Cmd-(Shift-)Tab to tool around your list of open applications, did you know you can press Cmd-Q to quit the hilighted app and Cmd-H to hide it? You most certainly can. :-) Thanks to Philip for that awesome tip.

For that matter, I still can’t get over how useful it is to be able to select an item with the mouse cursor, especially when the cursor is dragging something. For some reason I find this more intuitive with the Cmd-Tab bezel than with the Dock. Perhaps it’s because the bezel is in the middle of the screen, and typically larger.

Thank you Apple!