Posts tagged with “keyboard shortcuts”

Change Key Bindings in Pidgin

Posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 9:57pm by Rob Wilkerson

Today I was chatting with a colleague while booted into Linux. I specify my operating system because I only use Pidgin on Linux and have been using it as a chat client for exactly as long as I’ve been using Linux as my full-time OS at work. In other words, not very long at all. I don’t know most of the application’s nuances yet. So you can imagine my surprise when, while chatting with my colleague, typing a lowercase “h” started launching the “New Instant Message” dialog window. As far as I knew, I hadn’t done anything that could have remotely caused that to happen.

Also, it turns out that I use the lowercase “h” a lot when typing (who knew?) so not being able to use it caused some real heartburn. My colleague was understandably confused when he started seeing messages like this:

tHat’s wHat I was tHinking. tHis isn’t going to be mucH fun.

Try explaining why you’re not using the lowercase “h” without having the ability to use the lowercase “h”. Fun.

Having no idea what I did, I obviously had no idea what to do. I bounced X. Nothing. I bounced the machine. Nothing. I asked my resident Linux guru. Nothing. I had no idea what I could have done; it was certainly nothing intentional. Nor had I done anything consciously that I could point to and say, “it could have happened then.” Eventually, having tried everything I could think of, I jumped into the #pidgin chat room on irc.freenode.net. The good folks there solved my problem within seconds.

What I learned is that Pidgin provides a very easy way to modify the keyboard shortcuts available in its menus. Maybe too easy. To do so, open the menu, highlight the option and either hit the Backspace key to remove the shortcut key or press a new key or combination of keys to change the binding. Knowing that, it’s a lot easier to understand how the binding could be changed accidentally and without actually realizing that it was changed. In my case, all I had to do was:

  1. Open a conversation window
  2. Hover over Conversation > New Instant Message
  3. Hit Backspace

Problem solved.

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Locking Your Mac

Posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 6:57pm by Rob Wilkerson

Who knew? I’ve been a Mac owner for over a year now and never knew that you could lock a Mac in a way similar to the way a Windows machine can be locked. At work, locking my machine has become a natural part of the process of standing up. Get a little inertia behind the effort and hit Windows+L on the way to standing fully erect. It wasn’t always that way, but after returning to inverted mouse buttons, a modified Start menu and whatnot, I learned.

I have less need with my Mac since I rarely use it in the workplace, but there are times. I just never knew I could. There are a few hacky ways like setting a screensaver password and using a hot corner to start the screensaver, but that just seems, well, hacky. The way I prefer is this:

  1. Open the Keychain Access application (/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app)
  2. Open the application’s preferences (Cmd+,)
  3. Select the option to Show Status in Menu Bar

A padlock icon will appear on the menu bar. Click the icon and select the Lock Screen option and the machine will be locked. The screen cannot be unlocked without a password being entered.

It’s nowhere near as smooth as Windows+L, but it’s not quite as inelegant as the screensaver hot corner solution, either.

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Rockin' the Keyboard: Cycle Through Application Windows in a Space

Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 5:30pm by Rob Wilkerson

This may be old news to many, but today I happened on it by accident and, since it solves one of my major issues with Spaces – or at least with how I want to use Spaces, I thought it might help someone else.

The other day I wrote about how to make Spaces suck (just a little) less. I’ve been using the configuration described for 3 or 4 days now and so far it does, in fact, suck less. A nice win, but…

After a couple of days, a new gripe began to percolate. It turns out that Cmd+Tab‘ing is a lot less effective under this configuration. By way of an example, several of my Spaces include an open iTerm window and damn near all of my Spaces contain an open Firefox window. If I’m working in Eclipse in Space 2 and want to access my Firefox window in the same Space to test what I’ve just done, it’s no longer as easy as simply Cmd+Tab‘ing to get there. Actually, that’s not true. I can Cmd+Tab to the Firefox application, but only the application is activated – not a given window. Since there are Firefox windows opened in this desktop and in others, OS X has no way of knowing which one of those, if any, I really want to access. It would be nice if it would default to the one in the current Space (if one and only one exists), but…yeah, it doesn’t.

To mitigate my annoyance a bit, I started using Expose. Using the example above, I’d hit F9 and then click the Firefox window I wanted to work in. That works well enough, but it forces me to move my hand to the mouse and that slows me down (especially since I perform that particular action frequently). Today, though, I found (read: blindly stumbled onto) a better way. If I hit F9 (or F10, it seems) and then hit Tab, OS X will cycle through all of the applications on that desktop. Once the application I need is illuminated, I can hit Return and the most recently used window of that application assumes the focus. All windows of the selected application appear to assume a higher level of focus than those of other apps, but only the most recent actually becomes active, of course. It’s not quite as convenient as Cmd+Tab, maybe, but it’s not far from it. And anything that keeps my fingers on the keyboard is a good thing.

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