I use my keyboard to control my computer as much as possible. Espionage 3 6 5 download free. By using akeyboard to navigate, launch, and manage your applications and data, you can befaster and more accurate than with just a mouse because you can putcombinations and chords into your muscle memory.
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- View time & date simultaneously in any format, font or color, instantly view Google or Apple calendar/events right from the menubar, stop watch, countdown clock, moon phase, floating clocks, local ip, date difference calculator, application menu, alarms, global scheduler and ‘Take 5’ (like a Pomodoro timer) to remind you to take a break.
- BetterTouchTool.app/ BluePhoneElite 2.app/ BootXChanger.app/ Business Card Composer 4.app/ CSSEdit.app/ Calculator.app/ Carbon Copy Cloner.app/ Chess.app/ Chronories.app/ Clockmaker Icon Generator.app/ Cloud.app/ CocoaPacketAnalyzer.app/ Cog.app/ Colloquy.app/ DTerm.app/ DVD Player.app/ Dashboard.app/ Data Rescue 3.app/ Desktoday.app.
- BetterTouchTool is a great, feature packed app that allows you to customize various input devices on your Mac. Minimalist Pomodoro Timer (Goodtime).
- The Pomodoro Technique is probably one of the simplest productivity methods to implement. All you’ll need is a timer. Beyond that, there are no special apps, books, or tools required (though.
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Controlling your keyboard
I used to remap tons of things on my keyboards, but I’ve worked it down to twomain ones: I need my keyboard to have a
CTRL
key where Caps Lock normally is(inspired by “Modern Space Cadet” by SteveLosh) and I need anF19 key to fire off a second layer of “Hyper” key chords.![Pomodoro Pomodoro](https://community.folivora.ai/uploads/default/original/2X/1/1edd089d5ffb63fdbff057e9c516e8d1ef233d83.jpeg)
That special Hyper Key goes to some program that can change it into themega-chord of
CMD+SHIFT+OPT+CTRL
… which is not used anywhere else in theOS. That way I can be sure when I define a shortcut I’m not overriding anythingelse!I use karabiner elements to remap my builtin laptop keyboard. I use QMK to rewrite the firmware for allmy mechanical keyboards, so they“natively” have an F19. Both configurations put the F19 as the bottom left keyon the keyboard, where FN usually goes.
Hyper
![Pomodoro Pomodoro](https://cms-assets.tutsplus.com/uploads/users/80/posts/28918/image/1macro.jpg)
My hyper key does a few things: launches/focuses different common apps, movesand aligns windows, and fires some small scripts that I’ve written.
I mostly used it to switch between my terminal and my browser in my work as afront-end developer. Using iTerm’s non-native full screen, it meant I couldhave a focused full screen environment without the .25s animation that goeswith OSX’s built in full screen. Once you try it, you can’t go back to CMD+TAB.
I have gone through several different versions of the “Hyper” setup.Originally, I followed the original blog post to the letter, using KeyboardMaestro. Later I rebuilt it using Alfred workflows… mostly to try and cutdown on the amount of applications I was using. Both of these were a littleslow.
Since discovering hammerspoon, I’ve been usingthat as an abstraction layer to fire and control my mac from my keyboard. It’sbeen way faster for app switching than Keyboard Maestro or Alfred, andbecause it’s code I can check it into git and sync it between my work and homecomputer.
Hyper Hammerspoon
My full hammerspoon config ishere. A quick walkthrough:
My main configuration file isinit.lua. Itcontains a list of applications. I can set what monitor I prefer them to be onfor my window manager, I can set a hotkey for launching/focus, and I can alsoset a list of hotkeys I want to make available for use inside that application,all under my Hyper layer.
There is a plethora of keyboard shortcuts on OSX, and using the Hyper key layermeans that I can have universal shortcuts that work regardless of whatapplication I have focused without worrying about accidentally doing somethingin my current application.
When an F19 key is pressed,hyper.luais listening and invokes a layer that fires actions based on the list ininit.lua. If the application for which the shortcut key is pressed isn’t open,it opens it and then presses the key again. This lets me have a button thatalways opens a new Drafts.app draft or a new Tweetbot tweet… even if theapplication isn’t open yet.
I also make the hyper layer available to my scripts for moving windows andstarting timers, so that they are always one key away, no matter whatapplication I’m in. I’ve detailed the pomodorotimer elsewhere, but the movewindows script is partially written by Tom Millerwith some modifications by me.
Thanks to some help from @megalithic andnice people usinghammerspoon I alsohave hammerspoon automatically throwing applications to the windows I preferthem to live as soon as I add or remove a monitor. This is very handy for whenI come back to my workstation after being in a meeting. Sidify apple music converter 1 4 9.
The latest addition is a simple script thatconnects/disconnectsmy Airpods with a single button. Pasta 1 0.
Keyboard Interfaces to other Applications
Besides using vim and memorizing as manyshortcutsas possible, I use a couple of other tools to keep my hands on home row.
GitHub - Ng-vu/tomato: Tomato Is A Command For Running ..
Alfred
I’ve been using an app launcher for a longtime. I think I heard Merlin Manntalk about the quicksilver talk atgoogle on an old Macbreak Weekly.I believe the dev was subsequently hired by google, but that video alone mademe buy a Mac as my next computer.
Since then I’ve used Quicksilver, Launchbar, and now Alfred. For moreinformation about why Alfred and an overview of the general usefulness ofAlfred, check out the excellent review over at thesweetsetup, buthere are a few of the more esoteric things I use it for:
- Clipboard history/merging
- Access to Dash.app
- Toggling my OSX theme from Dark/Light… why not!
Vimium
I really like Vim’s modal interface. I’ve found that Vim’s shortcuts are in myfingers and therefore I tend to use it everywhere that I can.
There’s an awesome family of plugins for web browsers that bring some of thoseshortcuts to vim, both in terms of search and scrolling, but also interactingwith links. I mostly use it to navigate, using the
f
operator to open linksthat are interesting to me.OSX Readline
OSX has a rather robust version of readlineshortcuts available everywherethere’s a cursor. I use
<C-a>
and <C-e>
constantly… you can find a fulllist here.I’m constantly surprised that it has an actual killringregister separate fromthe built in clipboard. It’s occasionally very handy.
OSX Keyboard Pref Pane
I do have one more configuration trick: I use the built-in keyboard shortcutspane to rebind keys. There’s a bit of a trick to it, you have to put in theprecise name of the Menu item and a keyboard shortcut… even countsellipsis or specific possessive apostrophes. I’ll rebind some keys to morefamiliar positions, or more often unbind shortcuts that interfere with OSX’sbuilt in readline shortcuts. (Looking at you, Sketch.app!)
OSX Help Menu
Original Blog Post (RU)
I’ve known this one for a longtime,but a lot of people haven’t realized: if you hit
CMD+SHIFT+/
(basicallyCMD+?
) in most OSX apps it’ll focus the search box in the Help menu. Itsearches every menubar in the application. I originally used it to findthings in Photoshop that I had forgotten where they were… but now I just useit to quickly access the menubar.Apparently there’s a way to do this even faster/better using BetterTouchTool orHammerspoon, I may look into that. I’ll useSketchRunner for this in Sketch.app.
QMK Layers
I have adopted the ortholinear keyboard full time… and it’s led to a coupleinteresting changes.
I have a key on the right side of the keyboard that converts a portion of theright side to a tenkey, making entering numbers a little faster with one hand.I also have another layer for when I hold the tab key… it makes the top row(QWERT) send CMD+1-4, a common OSX shortcut for switching tabs, focusingcertain views… I’ve also bound a couple other convenience functions so thatmy left hand can reach all the things that I need for designing while my righthand is on my mouse.
There is a layer for gaming too if I’m using a 4x12 board, but that’s anotherblog post.
Conclusion
After typing portions of this into slack a few times, I finally decided to putit all in one article… at least for now. It’ll change in another year I’msure. Regardless of what parts you decide to implement and how, I think thatbeing efficient with tasks through automation or scripting can make you a moreeffective information worker. The parts that I can’t do without anymore:
- jumping to apps
- searching for/inside files quickly and acting on them
I think that a decade of tweaking how I move between programs on my computerhas landed me in a good place, I’m now more interested in doing more automationfor repetitive or predictable tasks. Stay tuned!
References:
Inspiration
Tools Used
- 2020-09-28 09:20:43 -0500Change repo nameI decided to change the name of my hammerspoon configuration repo to
`hammerspoon-config` to avoid confusion.. it's not the actual
hammerspoon executable, it's a configuration for that executable. - 2020-06-18 14:26:02 -0500Move everything to CSTDon't know why I didn't do that before. It caused _no_ end of
problems. - 2019-11-14 19:33:21 -0600Auditing the tags in the site..Many removed, cleaned up, or renamed.Tags with only one child got yanked.
- 2019-04-04 12:36:32 -0500Mention my other weird QMK layers
- 2019-04-03 22:41:34 -0500Remove broken image
- 2019-04-03 21:25:21 -0500Write Keyboard blogpost