OS X Keyboard Shortcut Junkie

I hate the mouse. I mean, think about it. You can have two hands typing independently of each other executing commands rapidly OR you can tie one of those hands up with a device with roughly 4 directional inputs and 2 selection inputs (or more depending on your mouse). Not only that, if you've got a 30" screen like me (and a side monitor), simply dragging your mouse all the way across your desktop can be an annoying task.

Never fear, those 100+ key inputs on your keyboard have your back. In OS X, if you go to your system preferences you'll find a "Keyboard & Mouse" settings area. Go there and then to "keyboard shortcuts" to find some nice shortcuts. A few of note:

1. Keyboard navigation - Tired of clicking on your dock or the menu bar at the top of your screen? Try hitting control-F3. If your dock appears, great. If not, then you don't have "full keyboard access" turned on. Turn it on with control-F1. From here you can either read the list of control-F# options, or simply toy around with them. Suddenly, moving focus to those floating windows you can't apple-tab to becomes trivial!
2. Screen zoom - It's not just for the blind. Ever watch a movie that's imbedded in a web page and mad that you can't resize it? No more. Turn on screen zoom with apple-option-8. Then use apple-option-minus or apple-option-plus to zoom in or out. I use it all the time to zoom in on the details of a web layout when designing, when showing someone something who's not immediately in front of the computer, and various other things.
3. Screen shots - Lot's of options here, though the key sequences are funky. You can do 2 things in 3 ways. First, choose to capture your screen shot to the clipboard or to a file. When you've made that decision, choose to capture the entire screen, or get some crosshairs to drag a custom portion of the screen. These are all listed in the shortcut list. But wait, there's one more that's not. If you do one of the options to bring up the crosshairs, simply hit space and the crosshairs turn into a camera icon. From here, click on any window to capture the whole thing.
4. Tab through everything - Tab is your friend. Hit it to hop all over the place. However, OS X minimizes the places tab will take you to to keep things simple. If you're anything but simple, change that toggle below the keyboard shortcuts to "all controls." Bam! Tab anywhere you want to go.

Try it out. You'll soon find that mouse a lot less useful and your computer operation speed through the roof.

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