So here’s a nice little Exposé trick that some of you might not have found yet. Press F9 or F10 to show either all the windows you have open or only your current apps windows. Now press TAB to cycle through to the grouped windows of the next app you have open. You can keep pressing TAB to bring each set of app windows into focus. If you know what app you’re after, you can Apple-TAB to bring up the app-switcher and choose it directly. Have you found any nice little bits of functionality yet?
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15 replies on “Share your nice little Panther tricks…”
IF you don’t install panther and stick with jaguar, you save $129. does that count as a feature? :p
Hmph. I’m on my third install in as many weeks of Panther. It’s good, but be careful about updating it. Either iSync 1.3 or the updated Mpeg2 Quicktime component has recently killed ALL my adobe apps. Not good.
Also had extreme oddness with an ‘update’ install – best advice is always do an ‘archive & clean install’ I guess.
One thing I like about the new app-switcher, and which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere, is that while you’re tabbing around, you can immediately Alt-Q to quit an app, without first selecting it. That is, to quit the third and fourth frontmost apps, hold down Alt and hit Tab, Tab, Q, Tab, Q.
A very usefull feature that was introduced by Action File under OS 9, followed by Default Folder under OS X, now included in Panther :
In the open/save dialogs, you can click on a grayed-out filename to copy that filename into the text input field. Very usefull when you want to save a variation of an existing file with [final draft] appended to the name.
Actually, I just noticed that the trick I mentionned (with many others) is on http://www.macosxhints.com
Okay, a friend of mine pointed out these two, that are not (yet) on macosxhints :
1. Command+ let you cycle between all the windows of the current application.
2. Control+Z cycles between all the windows of the visible applications. The hidden applications stay hidden. Also, Control+D brings up the dock so you can navigate it with the keyboard.
Once you’ve hit F9 or F10 and all the windows are tiled, you can also use the arrow keys to cycle between them – I’ve found this very handy along with the tab trick.
The arrow-key to cycle between ExposÈd windows trick is unfortunately strangely set up. Some windows I can only get to by hitting left arrow, others only by hitting right arrow. Trying to backtrack doesn’t work at all. Odd. As for the command-tab switcher, I went right back to using LiteSwitch: it’s more robust than Apple’s ripoff (acknowledging, of course, that LiteSwitch lifted the functionality from Windows…) and allows you to resize the icons to your liking, among other things.
The arrow key is directional I think – you click up to select ones above your current one, left to move to the left.
Androse: Command+< and > (for cycling through the windows of the current app) aren’t new to Panther. I can’t remember for how long I have used them, but they were definitely in Jaguar.
Apple-Tab to cycle between apps worked in Jaguar, too, but it wasn’t as nice in terms of user-feedback, as it only showed the apps highlighting along the dock (which we barely need now, btw, between Expose and Launchbar [shareware] – only using the dock now for the occasional drag and drop). Favorite feature I hadn’t heard of anywhere: control-click any item in the finder to zip archive it; or attach a folder to a message in Mail to send it as a zip. Both save time if you work with/for a lot of windows users…
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The Application Switcher is an almost exact copy of the functionality of LiteSwitch X from http://www.proteron.com which I found to be very handy in Jaguar. Glad to see the same functionality incorporated in Panther.
So far the little tricks about panther don’t make up for all the screw ups the os has.I went back to jag.And it wasn’t easy.But at least that os works.
Where can I find the:
1. the command button?
2. the control button?
on my keyboard?
Thank you!