Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Dock too big perhaps ?' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Dock too big perhaps ?
Authored by: osxpounder on Apr 08, '02 02:03:05PM

"This means that to 'unminimize' you'll ALWAYS hate to move the mouse down, click and move back. I use minimize a lot in codewarrior to quickly hide a window, peek in an underrlying one for simple info, and go back to the minimized one. With the minimize in dock effect, I went insane."

Well, it's a new OS, with new & different behaviors, to be sure. I largely agree with your gripes about the Dock, and, in the interest of speed and convenience, I tend to avoid reaching for the mouse if I can. Here are some suggestions, for you and others, that might help you as they have helped me:

1] turn on "Full Keyboard Access" in the Keyboard panel of System Prefs. I prefer to set "Use Control with:" to the Letter keys, so that I can use CTRL-D to go to the Dock, and use the arrow keys to pick out the icons in Dock. Since few Mac apps use the CTRL key for any command combos, and since 'd' for Dock is easy to remember, I find this really convenient.

2] don't minimize. You can use CMD-Tab and CMD-SHIFT Tab to switch among programs without minimizing them OR touching the mouse.

3] *Some* apps [the 'well-behaved' OSX ones, I believe] will let you use CMD-H to "Hide" the app. Some apps, however, have already assigned this key combo to something else. If you use hint 1], above, and enable Full Keyboard Access, you can do something similar to this, instead:

a] CTRL-M [or whatever *you* set as preference in Full Keyboard Access] to activate the app's menu bar.
b] choose "Hide [program name]" from the Application menu [the one with the app's name].

That's more keyboarding than I bother with, tho, so unless I find that an app refuses to "Hide" [hint 3], then I go with hint 2] and use the Tab key combos.

And of course I always have Full Keyboard Access enabled. Hope this helps.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Dock too big perhaps ?
Authored by: aranor on Apr 09, '02 11:00:16PM

Oh. A lot of programs will also support Cmd-` as a way to switch winows, even if it isn't documented anywhere. Very useful.



[ Reply to This | # ]