Using a mouse or trackpad is a major distraction and flow-breaker for many development tasks, especially programming. I strive for using keyboard s...
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Great write up and probably the article to finally push me to try Alfred. I have not seen Contexts before, I'll have to give that a look.
Also, nice Dirk Nowitzki wallpaper. He's been my favorite NBA player since I was in elementary school.
Do it, you won't ever look back :)
Thanks, I'm glad you like my article. Nice that you noticed my Dirk wallpaper :-)
i generally don't understand why none of these powerful but ever so commercial tools have a well known freemium / open source counterpart.
mac OS's universe is riddled with software that does rediculously simple stuff, yet costs 20 dollars, like KeyCue it shows a et of shortcuts ... how is everyone just ok with paying 20 dollars for such a thing.
I love Spectacle's functionality, but I find their shortcuts to be insane. Are you aware of other tools that are easier to use? I don't have the paid version of Alfred, but can Alread allow something like that to be scripted? I really only use it to switch displays and align left and right halves on my widescreen monitor.
What do you mean with "insane"? It's in the nature of things that you have to press 2 or 3 keys of Cmd, Option, Ctrl, etc. for managing focused windows. Otherwise you most probably use a key combo that is already reserved by the focused app or macOS. In addition, you can define your own shortcuts. E.g., it's easy for me to remember my Spectacle shortcuts. I press all of these special keys and than use:
I haven't mentioned all of Alfred's features. There are many more if you use Alfred's Powerpack. There are scripting capabilities I also plan to check out in the future: alfredapp.com/help/workflows/actio...
I should have mentioned that part of what complicates the shortcuts is my love of mechanical keyboards, I don't have any of my keyboards configured for OS X layout and mostly interact with my MacBook through a virtual KVM switch, so it can be confusing going back and forth.
Part of me wishes Apple would just bake these features in instead of giving us so much useless fluff. But the other part of me is happy to see developers profiting from the lack of super user features Mac OS lacks. So 🤷♂️
hi James, I have a similar opinion on that topic. Even if Apple would bake these features into macOS they couldn't satisfy every developer. Therefore I'm glad that Apple's ecosystem allows developers to create such a great variety of tools.
Nice article! I'm glad you mentioned Amethyst I have been a big fan for a long time! I would like to add another useful tool, it's a great open-source clipboard manager for macOS called Maccy. Check it out here github.com/p0deje/Maccy
Thank you for your recommendation. I will definitely check Maccy out. It seems to be a fee alternative for Alfred's clipboard manager.
Please add skhd to this guide. I have been using first khd and then skhd for 2 years now and it is absolutely fantastic.
It provides a simple dsl for mapping any key combination to a shell command. It gives you virtually unlimited ability to control what your computer is doing. You can also combine it with tmux to great effect as tmux comes with a CLI interface.
github.com/koekeishiya/skhd
You can even use skhd bindings to change skhd bindings as seen in my config file:
github.com/kwstannard/kws-scripts-...
That's very helpful!
I am a huge fan of Keyboard Maestro; it serves all of my requirement to create custom shortcuts, or mapping keys, or create complex macros.
Thanks a lot. You're totally right. I have updated the shortcuts in the macOS shortcut section.