Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Mac Magic Trick

A new magic trick: Command-comma opens preferences within most Mac apps!

30 years of fervant Mac use, including hours spent pouring over lists of obscure keyboard shortcuts, and I never knew this! It's a new day!


I love nothing more than being shown my gaps. My ignorance, my short-sightedness, my wrongness, my illogic. You can do me no greater favor than showing me that my favorite taco place is nothing special (by revealing how good tacos can actually be!), or that my conclusions are based on faulty assumptions. Of course your logic - and your taco - has to be on the money!

For one thing, this helps me course-correct, so I can be even more of an obnoxious know-it-all. But that's not the ultimate reason. It's that nothing great ever comes from knowing. The real treasure is leeched out of the ether by the enormous vacuum power of my yawing ignorance.

Possibly the greatest moment of my life came when I stepped up from being the best player in the bad middle school band to the worst player in the good one. I improved 1,000x every minute in the new setting, ecstatically discovering how complacent I'd been in my own wretched mediocrity.

It was an Awakening, but you can only wake up by realizing (and fully conceding) that you were previously asnooze. So I'm eternally thirsty for evidence of my own somnolence. Heaven's where I'm the very dumbest, wrongest, most limited, ignorant, blinkered, mulish sonofabitch.
Here's the big problem: I reflexively follow the Golden Rule, which is ruinous when you're the only person who enjoys being done unto a certain way.

2 comments:

  1. Do you know about Command-`? (As in back tick, right above tab). It's like Command-tab but for switching between windows of a single application as opposed to switching between applications. (I've surprised people by telling them about this one...)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes! But I should use it more!

    Here’s my favorite: While writing, try option left arrow or option right arrow. you can also hold down shift to extend selection.

    If you’re someone who likes to stick to keyboard and not use mouse, it’s a godsend!

    ReplyDelete