Dictionary has been part of Mac OS X since 10.4 and there is a feature that not many Mac users know about.
When you are in any of Cocoa (Mac native) applications you can hover your mouse above a word and press Ctrl-Cmd-D on your keyboard. You will get the Dictionary description for that word. Just move your mouse over to any other word and the Dictionary description for that word is displayed instantly.
You don’t need to have the Dictionary open at all.
A few examples where this works are; Safari, Mail.app, MacJournal, TextEdit, Text Wrangler, Comic Life, iWeb, etc. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with any of the Mozilla applications, including Firefox, Camino and Flock.
Invert screen
Another function that not many Mac users know is “Invert screen”. Just press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-8 on your keyboard and see your Mac invert its colours.
One could ask – Why would you ever want to do this? It comes very handy when your eyes are tired and some genius has been experimenting with background and text colours on his or her website … MySpace anyone?
It is also irreplaceable tool in photography, during the post production editing. If you have a large, bright picture and you are trying to locate any dark spots that you need to clone out (e.g. sensor dust, birds in the sky, etc.) it gets really tough on your eyes after a few minutes. Reverse colours and look for bright spots on the dark background – they stand out like Christmas lights at night.
It would be funny if you did this in Apple store and watched the salesperson freaking out.
Get 5 GB of free cloud storage with a a bonus 500 MB if you register via SilverMac, so you can safely back-up, share and synchronise your documents, photos, videos, music…
Slow motion
When you want to minimise a window, simply click on the yellow button in the top left corner. The window quickly goes down to the right end of your dock using either scaled or genie effect.
But if you hold down the shift key while clicking the window will minimise in slow motion, approximately five times slower than the normal speed.
Text clipping
I love telling this to my friends Windows users. I ask them how would they save a piece of text from the document they are viewing at the moment, for example a web page.
Their answer is usually something like: “Oh, easy. You select the text, right click and copy. Then you go to the desktop, right click and select New | Text file, give the file some name and click away. Now you double click the file to open it, paste the text in there and save it. Simple, isn’t it?”
Then I show them how to do it on Mac. I select the text and drag it to the desktop and that’s it. Dropped jaws everywhere.
If you want to include this text somewhere, say in an email, you simply drag the file into your composed email. Simple as that.
Screen capturing
This is my favourite of the Mac goodies. There are few ways to capture the screen on Mac.
Firstly, you can capture the whole screen. Simply press Cmd-Shift-3 on your keyboard and the screen will be captured in a PNG file and saved on your desktop as something like Picture 1.png. As of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) this file is named Screenshot-<date>-<time>.png.
You can also capture a selection, just press Cmd-Shift-4 on your keyboard and you will see a small cross hair selector on your screen.
Select the area you want to capture and let go, the file will be saved on your desktop, again something like Picture 1.png. As of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) you also get the infomration on the picture size (in pixels) which changes as you move the crosshair.
And finally you can capture the active window. Simply follow the steps above and once you see the cross hair, press the space bar and you will get a camera icon. Hover the camera above any window and the window will get the gray overlay indicating it’s in hot-spot. You can even capture the window that is in the background, as long as a part of it visible and allows you enough room to hover the camera icon over it. Click on it and the window will be captured.
Again, the file will be safely placed on your desktop as … good guess, Screenshot-<date>-<time>.png
However, if you’d like to capture the screen (or part of it) to the clipboard rather than to desktop, simply hold the Control key down while capturing, i.e. Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4.
This is very handy when you need to paste it straight into an email or any other document.
See some More cool stuff on your Mac
The drag text to desktop is also availble in Linux and *BSD, well KDE. And don’t forget kids, the middle mouse button pastes the selected text to where ever you like, no copy/paste required. This has been standard on unix for decades.
Awesome tips, thanks!!
Interesting. Thanks for the tips!
My Gnome desktop does everything here that isn’t just eye candy…
Right, text-clipping to the Desktop does not work on Windows. But it does work dragging text into another app, which is where you want the text to begin with. What use, really, is putting it on the Desktop, only to drag it again into another app? Drag directly into your email, word processor, text editor, URLs onto browser, etc. These do work on Windows.
A dictionary is available in most aplication text windows. Highlight the word, right click, and a menu allows you to select the dictionary among other things. If you have a single button mouse control-click does the same thing.
I thought I’d commented but can’t see it so apologies for double posting if I have.
Text Clipping – try Cmd and Alt to highlight text from within the body of text without being restricted to whole lines; slightly random but interesting.
And for Win users who may be envious of Screen Grabbing try Captrect from here:
http://www.yomogi.sakura.ne.jp/~si/SolidImage/index_e.shtml
which does a great job.
Love the screen invert one, nice :-)
You can use the shift key to slow down a lot of other effects as well. Try holding shift while you use Expose to show the desktop or other windows. You can even use the shift key to slow down the rotate effect that happens when you use apple’s fast user switching. Try using shift to slow down other effects you think might work! It’s fun using the shift key to really show off a mac to windows users. I think that’s the number one reason it was put there in the first place.
Enjoyed your article but wanted to add…
Re: Text clipping
This section is not completely accurate. Windows has “Snippets” instead of text clippings. It is the same functionality, though more Mac applications impliment Text Clippings than Windows apps impliment Snippets.
one thing i’ve found handy is the extras in cmd + tab. go to an item and press ‘h’ to hide that and press ‘q’ to quit it. tis beautiful.
On the screen capture, you can throw a control in the Cmd-Shift-4 and Cmd-Shift-3 and it will copy the image to your clipboard (instead of just making the png). Then you can just tab over to photoshop and paste the screenshot.. Cmd-Cntrl-Shift-4
I use the “white on black” option (invert) daily.
You can take your mac laptop outside and read normal 12pt font in Word or any text editor in direct sunlight. Haven’t tried this is on a new “glossy” mac laptop screen.
Shift clicking works with expose as well. Hold shift and activate it (usually F9-F11) Of course I love expose because its so fast, but it’s fun to watch with a handful of windows open :)
I wasn’t satisfied with having PNG files as my default picture files, and there is a way to change the format in terminal. I’d look it up, but I’m too busy destroying my rods and cones with the inversion shortcut.
KillAll Dock returns KillAll: command not found when I try it
The “clipping” effect worked in Windows 98: select and drag a portion of text onto your desktop, and it would appear as a clip. I don’t think it worked in reverse (dragging a clip into an email), and the icon was also ugly (but then again, there were a lot of ugly things in Windows 98).
On a MacBook(pro) you can zoom to the cursor by holding Function + Control (fn + ctrl) and using two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Quite useful when you need it.
It may also work on newer powerbooks as they had two-fiunger scrolling.
Marco, this doesn’t work. I’m running 10.4.7, and you can’t input commands during the Genie sequence.
If you hold shift and use Expose or show the Dashboard it does it all in slow motion. And if you have widgets that expand & contract using animation. Those too take it slow with a shift click…
Two comments on text clipping…
1. Any Windows user who bothers to go through the right-click > new > text file gyrations is a newb. Put Notepad on your quicklaunch bar and learn the shortcut for copy and paste. Also, this doesn’t create a file if you don’t want it to.
2. Is this really a good mechanism anyway? Selected text isn’t a “file” per-se, so Finder is making that decision for you. It’s not horrible, but it’s not perfect.
If you add Ctrl to the screen capture key combinations, then it will take the snapshot and place it on the clipboard instead of to a file. So for example, if you wanted to take a full screen shot and e-mail it to someone but don’t care about saving it in a file for later, you could hit Cmd-Shift-Ctrl-3 and then in a new message window in Mail do an Edit->Paste (Cmd-V).
• To quickly and easily select a certain word but not any surrounding space or punctuation, double-click on it. It’s also possible to select a paragraph in the same manner by triple-clicking on it. Additionally, you can extend the selection by keeping the mouse button pressed after pressing it for the last time (the second and third time for words and paragraphs respectively).
• To move to the beginning or end of a line of text, press command-left or command-right respectively.
• The icon to the left the window title represents the file or folder which that window represents as a Finder object. For example, you can drag this icon into a folder.
• To quickly navigate to a folder which is open in Finder when selecting a file or folder using a file or folder selection dialogue, drag the folder onto the dialogue.
• To quickly see the definition of any word, position the cursor over it and press command-control-D.
@ KP – Yeah, my powerbook does the same thing (pretty much same model, but slower). Still really cool, though, inverted gray-scale…
The dictionary thing didn’t work for me. 10.4.6. iMac G5.
Also, if you hold the control key during any of the screen-capture sequences, the screen image will be saved to the clipboard instead of a PNG file on your desktop.
additional screen shot features:
Command-Shift-4 + spacebar: This allows you to capture a single window, dropdown menu, or what-have-you. The file retains the opacity of the original object (drop downs are semi transparent, windows are transparent in the corners)
don’t want to get screenshots all over your desktop? then get screenshots put into your clipboard instead!
control-command-shift-3: full screen capture
control-command-shift-4: crosshair selection
control-command-shift-4 + spacebar: window/menu
Me and my friends did the inverted screens to all the Macs at my school one day (about 90) and the lab assistants could figure out what was going on. I later found out that they ended up wipeing out the user profiles on all of them and recreating them. That made me feel like an asshole. lol oops well thats my story
What about the system-wide zooming? Make sure you have zooming turned on in system preference, then press command+option+ “=” or command+ option+”-”.
Here’s an addition to the tect clipping feature.
If you highlight text in Safari, you can than drag it directly to the Mail icon in the dock and it open a new mail message containing the text. This will also work with other applications besides safari, such as TextEdit.
About screen capture… If you hold the ctrl key in addition to the other keys (for instance, Cmd-ctrl-Shift-3), the picture goes to the clipboard instead of being written to a file.
To remember that, just think about the C : *c*trl = *c*opy
One more screen capture tidbit: Once you’ve determined which screen cap method to use, hold Control as you click and the capture will be placed in your clipboard.
As a further refinement on your screen captures, you can capture them to the clipboard rather than to a file. Simply add the Control key to any of the standard screen capture sequences and you get the screen capture on the clipboard (ie Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4). Very handy when you just want to paste into an e-mail and not keep it around.
COOL! Love the invert screen the most.
Actually the invert screen thing saves a lot of battery power on my MacBook.
I get like an extra 30 mins out of it.
Microsoft used to have “OLE Scraps” that were like the clipping feature on Macs. This was back in the Win95 beta time period. It might still work if you open WordPad, highlight text and drag it to the desktop. It works in Windows 2000.
re: screen captures. if you hold down the control key when you click your mouse (after pressing cmd+shift+4), it will copy the picture to your clipboard (rather than create the .png file on your desktop). you can then paste it directly into photoshop, mail, ichat, etc.
also, if you’re doing a cmd+shift+4 screen grab and change your mind, clicking the esc key will release your mouse from screen grab mode.
Add Ctrl to the screen capture key combos (Ctrl-Cmd-Shift-3, Ctrl-Cmd-Shift-4) and instead of saving the image to the Desktop, it’s saved to the Clipboard, ready for pasting into another document.
in terminal type
emacs (press enter)
press (ESC+X )at the same time
then type tetris
AND PLAY TETRIS
i can’t use the ctrl cmd d in any app. I try to change itu to f7 (just like in macworld article) still nothing happen ??? mini 10.47
Thought you ought to know this – hold down Option before you click on a file (or selection of files) in finder, then drag and drop to copy. Use Command instead to move the file(s).
So, yeah, there -is- cut-n-paste too.
Finder also copies files when dropping across different volumes, but moves them when within the same volume (eg from a folder to another folder on Macintosh HD). Pretty cool, huh?
Re: Huh.
Tetris in Emacs! O_O This is fantastic
Note that you can turn the zoom feature on/off using Command+Option+8. No need to go into the system prefs.
I love the zoom feature for watching embedded videos (nearly) full-screen for example. On sites like YouTube, it even gives you a smoother picture than if you used their own full-screen button.
What would be really cool for Leopard though, would be if they would implement the zoom by scaling the entire UI, rather than just zooming in on the pixels ;).
The text clipping feature certainly sounds cool but that still sounds like a lot of work to me. :)
I use ShirusuPad for taking down notes. An awesome, elegant and tiny application that does its job and does it well.
Just highlight the text you want to copy and hold down Ctrl+C for a few seconds. Shirusupad will quickly pop-up and you can either make a new note or append to an existing one.
No more click and drag routines…
There is another option that is really handy:
If you press the apple-shift-4 gives you the cross hair, that you can size to your likings, pressing space now, gives you the ability to move that selection around, releasing the space lets you size again, pressing space again gives control over the selection again, and so on
You can also shift-F9, shift-F10, shift-F11 with exposé, and shift-F12 with dashboard.
Here’s one that I just stumbled across yesterday.
Holding down the “Command key” and a number key together will open websites in your Safari Bookmarks bar. So, the first website (the one on the far left) in my bar is “Bloglines.” If I hit “Command-1″ then it’s off to Blogllnes we go!