OSX's almost hidden grab and dictionary and front row keystrokes.★
We all know about Tiger's ever-so-buried Services menu right? Its incredibly useful if, perchance, you have the presence of mind to actually navigate to it which, I admit, is sometimes an effort for the best of us.
There are however some really useful functions in there, from summarize ( if you don't know what that is, you need to subscribe to Twit's MacBreak ), to the dictionary, google search and new sticky note maker.
Well believe it or not, Tiger has actually had built-in keystrokes for a lot of these actions from day one-and-a-half. Yup, I didn't believe it myself, at least not until I managed to co-ordinate my fingers and connect them with the keys to finally see for myself the truth.
There's a nifty, reliable keystroke to take a screen capture and save it to the desktop / copy to clipboard, you can also capture a selection as well. ( Command+Shift+3 for screenshot, or Command+Shift+4 for selection shot)
A handy nicely designed dictionary widget style popup can appear as you hold down the right keystroke and hover over words on the screen, which looks way better and even, dare I say, Cool:
All these keystrokes are listed in system preferences, keyboard & mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts. I mean, come on, who would have ever thought to look there? Now, if you want a list of all those handy keystrokes you just have to navigate to system preferences, click on the keyboardy button.... click on keyboard shortcuts.......
But I had a better way of remembering them, namely saving them as a sticky note on the dashboard and to save you the trouble of typing all the functions out, well:
Screen Shot
Cmd+Shift+3 (to file)
Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+3 (to clipboard)
Screen Selection Shot
Cmd+Shift+4 (to file)
Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4 (to clipboard)
Dictionary Lookup
Cmd+Ctrl+D
Front Row
Cmd+Esc
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Easy copy and paste job now!
Labels: keystrokes, tips
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Friday, February 16, 2007 11:46 AM | Links to this post
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