Blog Post

Become a Mac Power User: General OS X


Drag and Drop. Anything.




Smart Folders


Multimedia Inter-connectivity





12 Responses to “Become a Mac Power User: General OS X”

  1. JLA.

    Your bang on with the control F2 to access the apple menu etcâ€¦
    FYI you can use control F3 to access the dock and control F8 to access the menulets.

  2. @Nick – I have Quicksilver, and it is very nice. Combined with Spotlight (for searching the contents of files), the search capabilities are impressive.

    What I want is a way to open the File menu (or other menus) without using a mouse or know every multi-key combination for every application. Turns out there is an answer – CTRL-F2. It selects the Apple menu, which you can then arrow over to the menu you want. Not as good as menu hot keys, but a huge help!

  3. JLA: I think what you mean is how do I get the drop down menu in a menubar? Well you have to remember what they all are first (experience) and then its just natural. Or you can go into System>Keyboard & Mouse and then just add shortcuts to your applications. Hope that makes sense!

  4. I just found out recently about “Drag and Drop Anything.” I dragged an email into The Hit List and made a new task with the link to the email. Dragging an email into any app and creating a link back to that email is a invaluable feature :)

  5. Well, for the love of pete, would you mind explaining to me how I can access a File menu without a mouse/trackpad? Just that one little thing would make my life with this MBP much easier.

    Wouldn’t mind having consistent text editing key mappings across all applications, too. See Gmail vs. OpenOffice vs. TextEdit vs. Eclipse etc etc etc

  6. I am a big fan of shortcuts. Learning the shortcuts is the quickest way to becoming a real Power User. I can control my system with just a keyboard. I have been able to adapt most shortcuts to the Adobe apps which I use regularly at work. I amaze friends who have MacBooks (Im not used to trackpads) when I am able to run their system by justing using the Finder and TABing around.