A keyboard shortcut to add hyperlinks in Mail.app

Finally! For years, I wanted an easy way to press COMMAND-K to add a hyperlink in Mail.app instead of using Edit | Link | Add.

Hawk Wings has a how-to. Just follow the directions and it will work.

Thank you! I will use this every day...

The trick is to set the Mail.app keyboard shortcut through the system preferences then reference the menu item through it's title "Add...". This, amazingly, works. You can now press COMMAND-K, paste in the link and it's done.

MacVim: vi never looked so pretty

Vi is a text editor with an absolute bastard of a vertical learning curve.

It's so tough, you'll think you're crazy learning it.

And now its lickable on the Mac thanks to the MacVim Mac app!


MacVim adds a slick wrapper of services around the familiar gvim interface including auto-updating with Sparkle, nice integration with Mac copy and paste, Apple-N for new windows, a multiple window interface and transparency (:set trans=10).

Vi is powerful and fast and awesome. It's search and replace regex support is rich and you can run vim commands as scripts. It has syntax highlighting, spell checking and limitless undo. You can navigate without moving your hands from the keyboard. And the keyboard movement controls are used again and again on computers, from unix man pages to Boston.com's The Big Picture.

This little app is so famous, you can run Microsoft Outlook, Word and Visual Studio 2008 with vi editing in-line on a PC using viemu (that app's not free like vim unfortunately).

Thanks to Bram Moolenaar at vim.org for his awesome work and for an application I wouldn't want to live without. Look on vim.org for vim on your operating system.

Growl, email and potential insanity

If you use Growl for system-wide notifications, then you may want to check out the MailMe notification. This is only useful for people that reserve Growl for important notifications or it will REALLY irritate you. WARNING: Dial down your notifications in subscribing apps first.

Once turned on, you give permission for Growl to send emails. When a Growl notification happens (like an IM chat starting in Adium), a message will be sent to the nominated email account.

This has come in handy when I've been away from my computer (like at lunch, in a meeting, out) and want to know what my system is up to. I have an iPhone so I get email everywhere.

Use it as you will - but dial down your notifications to things you really want to know about or it will drive you nuts.

Top - find those greedy processes using Terminal

Want to find those greedy processes? Wanna bet it's Firefox? Just kidding. Sort of. Just run this at the Terminal window (Applications folder | Utilities folder | Terminal, or just launch Quicksilver and type "Terminal"):

top -ocpu

This will list all your running processes by CPU utilization. The offender will be at the top.

Press "q" to quit. The PID can be used to kill the process as well, but that's probably only for more advanced users. I use this technique occasionally when I need to SSH into my mac box and kill some process that's sucking on the resource pipe a little too hard :)

Suspend your virtual machine - it's faster!

If you still need the occasional windows world application, consider using suspend to speed up the process.

When I need a Windows application I can boot up Parallels or VMWare Fusion, press play and the virtual machine is available within about a minute or so. This is much faster than a cold boot.

When you’re done, just go to Virtual Machine | Suspend and within about 30 seconds you can quit the app and you’re done.

It’s on-demand computing, fast and convenient.

NTFS for Mac

NTFS for Mac (Paragon) is a file system plugin for Mac OS/X allowing access to Windows NTFS drives. I've got history with this product. The current version I'm using (v6.5.1) works very well. I can access my external NTFS drives and read and write to them.

The previous version I installed didn't work - in fact it messed with random files during file operations rendering them useless after copying. I'm very glad I did tests first. It didn't destroy the file allocation indexes, fortunately, but I immediately uninstalled the product and it took me months to get the courage to try again. I just used a gigabit local network and a windows laptop to copy files in the meantime.

Paragon support was responsive and offered a new version to try but I didn't try it immediately because if there's one product that must not fail, it is filesystem driver software!

Months later I downloaded their updated version and tried a few tentative tests and it worked fine for me. Since then I've used it for over six months and it's been good.

So my advice: buy it if you work with external NTFS drives. But test thoroughly first before using with your hardware. And if the data is REALLY important, use a gigabit network or NAS (network attached storage) device to bridge the Mac-PC divide.

Git now available on Mac OS/X

If you love git or want to try git, you now can on Mac OS/X.

Get the git installer on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/.

Git is a (relatively) new source control system that uses crypto hashes to guarantee the consistency of the repository and do some magically-fast branch comparisons. It also facilitates local commits, cheap branches and fast distributed workflow for teams.

Find out more on http://git-scm.com. There's a windows (cygwin, msysgit) version available and of course linux, where git was originally borned :)

Right now I can only see support on the Mac for a subset of git commands {git, git-cvsserver, git-shell, git-upload-pack, gitk} so git-svn and git-daemon are missing but it's a great start and works very well - much quicker than the windows cygwin-based version. Props for getting gitk to work - that's a great branch visualisation tool.

Thanks to the team that put the installer together - git is great for tracking changes to local projects even if you don't have an upstream workflow to push or pull from.

Switching to minimized windows with Apple-Tab

I finally figured it out after years of frustration when writing the previous article...
If you want to bring up a minimized window with the task switcher (Apple-Tab key combination):
HOLD DOWN THE OPTION KEY before LETTING GO OF THE APPLE KEY!
Oh my god, why isn't this the default instead of buried?!
Sigh.

Witch - better task switching

If you're annoyed with the way the Mac switches running programs with the key combination, look at Switch. It looks a little different but has one important feature:
IT MAXIMIZES DOCK-MINIMIZED WINDOWS when you switch to them.
Read a later post on how to do this without Switch...