One thing that has always annoyed me in OS X is that the Empty Trash shortcut only works in Finder, so I wrote an AppleScript that lets you empty the trash from any application. First you'll need to download
Spark. Make sure the Spark daemon is running and that 'Start Spark Daemon at Login' is checked in the General tab of the Preferences window. Once you have it set up, hit Command-1 to create a new AppleScript shortcut. Copy and paste this code into the window that comes up:
The
showWarning property tells the script whether or not to show the confirmation dialog when you empty the trash. If it's set to
true then you'll get the standard warning, and after you hit OK or Cancel, you'll be taken back to whatever app you were in. If it's
false, then the trash will just empty itself in the background.
Once you've pasted the script into the new window, add a shortcut for it in Spark, give it a name, and click the Create button. Now you'll be able to call the script from any application using the shortcut you defined. You could probably do the same thing in Snow Leopard by creating a service and then assigning it a custom shortcut in the Keyboard preference pane, but I haven't upgraded yet so I haven't tried it.