Control Option Command

As mentioned before: Mouse bad, Keyboard good. Back when I thought I was going to be a designer and spend my life in Photoshop and Illustrator I still was a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts. Difference is that since the mouse was, by necessity, my weapon of choice in those days and my love for hotkeys was limited to those found within the apps themselves. Nowadays I spend most of my screentime working in TextMate and don’t reach for the mouse unless I have to.

In my ongoing rant about killer keystrokes I’m gonna turn to an app I found while trying to solve a particular conundrum.
The story goes like this: After a long time of using my laptop keyboard I’d gotten used to having my Exposé keys be the four rightmost F-keys. F9 through F12 on a MacBook Pro. When I got an external keyboard Apple had graciously endowed me with seven more F-keys, up to a grand total of 19. Ever the autist, the thought of reprogramming my muscle memory to slamming down at a new location seemed too much of a chore. However, I couldn’t just remap Exposé to F16 through F19, because then I’d be stranded when I used my laptop without the external keyboard.

I tried several solutions, starting of course with searching iUseThis where somehow I didn’t find this particular app at the time. I lurked around several AppleScript fora and found some solutions that was just too damn dirty to be acceptable. Finally I found QuicKeys.

My solution? Remap F16 through F19 to fire off F9 through F12. This may still seem a bit dirty. After all, now I have a duplicate set of Exposé keys, but think about it; My brain is hardwired to use F9 – F12 for Exposé so I’ll really never be able to use them for anything else. Furthermore I only ever use F16 – F19 when my external keyboard is attached, so they’re doing exactly what I want. Enough of the dreary backstory. Let’s have a look at QuicKeys.

The best way to show you why I find this app useful is to show you a few of the shortcuts I use myself:

In the image above some of these are pretty obvious; The first four are the F-Key remappings I mentioned above, and the fifth play/pauses iTunes.
Then it gets a bit more interesting:

• New blog post.
  I’ve mentioned before that I use TextMate for blogging. Let’s say I suddenly get the urge to fire off a rebuttal of one of John Gruber’s posts (as if I’d dare) while reading Daring Fireball. One keystroke switches to TextMate and opens up a new blog post template ready to fly. This would of course work for any blogging software you use, and probably even open your admin panel in the browser with a bit of tweaking.
• Open in TextMate / Firefox.
  These go hand in hand. I’ve got I don’t know how many html files on my machine. Some times I want to preview them in Firefox, some times I want to edit them in TextMate. Right-clicking and choosing “open with” is for… other people. I hit ⌘-⌃-O to open them in Firefox and ⌘-⇧-O to open in TextMate. This works for any file by the way.
• Open Switch Test.
  I don’t use this one anymore, but it might be interesting anyway. For a while I was using Flex Builder to write ActionScript for Flash. I got irked that I couldn’t just hit a key from within Flex and have it switch over to Flash to test my movie. Now it can.
• Switch to TextMate.
  I, as you, goof off at work every once in a blue moon. Luckily my boss (in his own words) won’t be able to tell just what the hell I’m doing, but it’ll look good to him as long as my editor of choice, of which I may have spoken once or twice, is what he sees on my monitor. This beauty brings TextMate to front and hides all other apps.
• Yojimbo show/hide.
  Another problem I feel I shouldn’t have to solve, but ultimately found I had to. My Yojimbo hotkey stopped working after some OS update. I’ve since reinstalled my entire OS, and my Yojimbo install is mint, so I sincerely don’t believe I’m to blame. This one just performs, in programming terms, a simple if / else. if(Yojimbo is showing){ hide it } else { show it }. Tadaa!

I know from dipping my toes at the Quickeys forum that I’m barely scratching the surface here. There’s things I haven’t figuredd out how to do that I really want to do, but all in all this is one killer app in my book. I find myself “writing” new commands all the time. You don’t need arcane computer skills to use it either (sometimes I wish it was more complex). Here’s a snap that shows the interface when you might be making the Show / Hide shortcut:

My only complaint is that it’s a bit pricey. You’ll shell out 80$ for a single user license. In my book though, it was well worth it. I’ll just throw this in at the end: Also available for Windows.

Boilerplate disclaimer: Unless otherwise explicitly stated I have not been paid by or received any compensation from the makers of any of the products I mention in any of my posts. Hell, why would I. Only my mom reads this blog and she has no idea what the hell I’m going on about.

That rounds off my look at Quickeys, but I’m nowhere nigh shutting up about keyboard shortcuts in general. Expect more.