Give Us One Minute

Previously in our series we presented some basic keyboard combinations to move around within our documents. Today we demonstrate how not to touch your mouse to control your applications? That’s right, with simple keystroke combinations we can open applications, switch between them and close them.

Opening Applications:
We imagine that most new Mac folks open applications using the dock or by the more tedious process of clicking on some icon to reveal their applications and then scrolling through the list finally resting on the required application and then clicking the mouse button. Sheesh…that seems like an awfully unproductive way to open an application nowadays. There are ways to assign keystroke to applications, but we don’t use ’em and besides, we have a much better way to do this as we’ll describe during a later post (seasoned Mac users know where we are headed with this one).

In the mean time we offer this little keystroke tip that we still occasionally use. You know that little blue magnifying glass in the upper-right corner of your Mac. Yea…you’ve seen it. You know it as Spotlight and most often you probably use it to find “stuff” on your computer. You can also use Spotlight as a nifty application launcher. Here’s how.

1. Activate Spotlight using cmd-space.
2. Begin typing the first few letters of the application you want open. You should see the application appear quite quickly.
3. Using down arrow, highlight the application and then hit return.

The application opens and you never had to take your hand off the keyboard or search through a laundry list of applications. Sweet! You can also save time and use this technique to open specific files. Search for the file, select it using the steps above and hit return. The application used to create the file will load with the file contents. How many mouse clicks and keystrokes did we save you there? We venture to guess…bunches.

Switching Between Applications:
The simple keystroke combination cmd-tab allows you to view all the applications that are currently active. Try it and you will be presented with a list of your applications similar to the image below.

Using this keystroke often becomes and epiphany for the new Mac user. They can’t believe all those applications are running. Sure, you hit the red button and closed the window, but the Mac has a dirty little secret. It’s not Windows–which is a good dirty little secret. You must close applications as we’ll demonstrate a bit later. For now you can cycle through your applications by continuing to holding down cmd and pressing tab. If you happen to move too quickly past an application, you can hold down shift along with cmd and the selection will happen in reverse allowing you to go backwards through the list of open applications. You might need to practice that one. Once you land on the application needed, simply release cmd. The application selected will not become the active application.

Closing Applications:
Applications are normally closed using one of two methods, using either the pull-down menu, which is a no-no since you have to take your hand off the keyboard or by using the quick and simple cmd-q keystroke combination. We recommend that you try and make a habit of closing applications that you aren’t using at the time and by applying our little quick keyboard shortcut you can do this in the blink of an eye. Those readers with older Macs and/or Macs with small amounts of RAM will benefit significantly from this quick tip as the more applications you have open, the slower you computer becomes and, yes, you guessed it, our productivity level decreases. Now let’s combine a couple of tips today to make you one step closer to keyboard ninja status. Remember how we cycled through our open applications using cmd-tab combination? Let’s use those keys again and this time instead of releasing cmd when you land on an application, hit q. The application will now close. You can close a whole series of applications very quickly using this technique.

Did we miss one of your favorite keyboard shortcuts? Leave us a comment and let us know. Alright, we know how to control our applications using the keyboard, tomorrow we’ll take a look at how to use our keyboard to insert characters that are not represented on our keyboards such as the  symbol.

Technorati Tags: apple, productivity, keystrokes, tiger, os x, tips,getting things done, gtd