Hawk Wings » keyboard shortcut

Auto-Complete: Faster Address Book entry

Tim Gaden — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:46:58 +0000

A tip on macOSXHints points out a short-cut for text entry in Address Book.

Pressing Option-Escape in a text field, opens an autocomplete dialogue with options from previously entered cards.

Like all these tips, it makes perfect sense when you think about, but who ever thinks about it?

For example, type the first two or three letters of the name, hit Option-Escape and then just choose from the options that appear:

This is especially useful with spouses or large numbers of employees from one company or those English Fotherington-Smythe cousins.

Unfortunately, Address Book Quick Entry (now my preferred faster way of entering contacts) isn’t as smart about this. Hitting Option-Escape here brings up a general autocomplete list rather than previous values from Address Book itself.productivity, address book, text entry, keyboard shortcut, time saving, tipSimilar Posts:

Destroy an email immediately in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 15:14:15 +0000

macOSXHints returns from holidays with a simple but great tip.

You can delete an email permanently by pressing the keyboard shortcut for “Cut” — Command-X — when the message is highlighted in Apple Mail.

Makes sense when you think about it, but I’d never thought of it before. It also saves a second trip to the Trash to delete the messages again when you are spring cleaning.

Check it out; and read Rob’s cautionary footnote.

UPDATE: As David Chartier wisely points out on TUAW, bypassing the Trash like this mean that when the email is gone, it’s really gone.

However, if you realise you’ve done a stupid thing, the “paste” key (Command-V) will return the message from the clipboard to the mailbox, providing that you haven’t placed something else on the clipboard in the meantime. Whew! Similar Posts:

Emailing URLs the hard way

Tim Gaden — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 02:59:38 +0000

There are at least two tips floating around on the Internet at the moment, offering “faster” or “easier” ways for emailing a URL while browsing in Safari.

One is an Automator action, the other an AppleScript.

The Automator tip makes hard work of emailing a URL. It’s clever, but it seems to add nothing new. The keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-I in Safari will create a new email with the URL in Mail.app.

If you must use a mouse, dragging the URL from Safari’s address bar onto the Apple Mail icon in the Dock does the same thing.

The AppleScript tip is clever too, but doesn’t seem to add anything either. By the time you have called the script, you could have typed the “Check this out:” which the script prepends to the URL four times. Actually, you could probably type it even faster than that.

It’s amazing what keyboard shortcuts can do.

Here is a list of ten great ones for Mail.app and a comprehensive listing of all the shortcuts documented for Apple Mail.

Or perhaps you want to make your own keyboard shortcuts for Mail.Similar Posts:

Keyboard shortcut for mailbox info

Tim Gaden — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 01:14:11 +0000

Bryan Campbell emails to say that he inadvertently came across an undocumented keyboard shortcut.

If you hit Command-I while you’re in Mail, it will bring up an Account Info dialog box which tells you all sort of interesting things about your account. If you have an IMAP account, for example, it will tell you how much of your quota you have used and how big all your mailboxes are, and allow you to modify the behaviour of Mail’s Special Mailboxes.

If you have a POP account it will list any messages still on the server and give you the option to delete them.

I say “undocumented”. That is to say, it is not included in the 70+ keyboard shortcuts in Mail’s help file (I’ve made a helpful PDF of them which you can find in this entry). Nor does it appear as an option in any of Mail.app‘s menus.

Of course, you can get the same result by selecting a mailbox in the Mailbox Drawer on the left, Control-clicking and selecting the “Get Info” option. But you have to use a mouse for that.

[Thanks, Bryan!]Similar Posts:

A smarter Dictionary shortcut

Tim Gaden — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:58:36 +0000

I’ve blogged before about using the Dictionary and Thesaurus in Apple Mail and about rolling your own Shortcuts.

A neat tip on macOSXHints combines the two.

Not wanting to send an email by mistake when trying to check a word in the Dictionary (like this poor guy), the poster decided to change the keyboard shortcut for the Dictionary from Control-Command-D to F7. (You could, of course, choose any shortcut you like, following the instructions here and modifying the “Look up in Dictionary” shortcut.)

What’s extra clever about this, though, is that the new shortcut becomes something more than the old one was.

The poster discovered that the new shortcut acts as a kind of “toggle switch”. After pressing F7 he could move the mouse over as many words as he liked and get a definition for each. When he was finished, hitting F7 again toggled the “Dictionary mode” off again.

Excellent tip. Never has it been so easy to understand those emails from friends who take pride in being obscure!

(This will work in other apps too.) Similar Posts:

Forwarding email headers in Apple Mail

Tim Gaden — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 21:29:45 +0000

Jorge emails to ask how to forward an email complete with headers in Apple Mail.

First you need to display the headers. Shift-Command-H makes them appear. If you are a “mouser”, click on Long Headers in the Message sub-menu of the View menu or on the Long Headers button in your Toolbar (if it is there).

Then simply forward the message. Shift-Command-F is the keyboard shortcut, or use the Forward button on the toolbar.

There the headers are, ready to go!Similar Posts:

Pressing the wrong key: Another sad story

Tim Gaden — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:38:05 +0000

Remember “Pressing the wrong button: a sad story” — the sad tale of an Apple Mail user who hit Send instead of Delete?

Here’s another mistyped keystroke story involving some finger-slippage between the shortcuts for Dictionary and Send.

I felt for him. I did something similar yesterday. Reading this made me glad that I have modified my Send keyboard shortcut.Similar Posts:

Setting a minimum HTML font size

Tim Gaden — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 23:48:05 +0000

I have written before about the eye-bending frustration of small font sizes in Apple Mail.

Usually these are HTML emails composed in Outlook or Outlook Express.

The tips I blogged before about turning HTML off completely or toggling the view between the Plain Text and HTML portions of the email are still good ones, especially these keyboard shortcuts:

You can view the plain text version using the keyboard shortcut “Command-Option-P”, or toggle through the available formats using “Command-]” and “Command-[".

But here's another work around if small font sizes bug you too. It adds a new key to your com.apple.mail.plist file that will govern the size of HTML text.

1. Quit Mail

2. Open the Terminal and type in the following:

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13

3. Restart Mail.app and your HTML messages are readable.

Of course you can set the point size to whatever you like.

[Via comments on this post at macOSXHints.]Similar Posts:

Mail Act-on – Getting sorted, saving time

Tim Gaden — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 12:36:25 +0000

Everyone’s talking about it, so why not join in? Mail Act-on is everyone’s plug-in of the moment. Reviews on 43 Folders, MacOSXHints, About.com, Amit Gupta’s Blog and MacWorld rave about the time it saves and the neatness it brings to your inbox.

Mail Act-on is a plug-in that allows you to create rules, which at the press of a keystroke move emails out of your inbox into any folder that you set. It’s amazingly flexible. Any action you can set in an Apple Mail rule, you can get this thing to do – moving, copying, setting the colour of the subject line, the list goes on and on. Hit a configurable “hot-key” (set to “`” by default) and a list of your rules pops up. Hit the relevant key and the highlighted message has gone to its new home.

Some reviewers recommend combining its use with a “Respond-Action-Hold-Waiting-Archive” schema of folders for sorting mail and getting Ã¼ber-efficient. That’s not for me. I soon forget about the emails I moved into the Action folder, or worry about which of the folders a particular email should be in. But even without this extra step, my inbox is smaller and I deal with things faster.

Mail Act-on is free, although the creator, Scott Morrison, accepts donations. You can download it from his web site.mail act-on, scott morrison, filing, email, rules, plugin, keyboard shortcut, mail.app, apple mailSimilar Posts: