The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Emulate Firefox’s type-ahead search in Safari

Fri, Dec 21 2007 at 7:30AM PST • Submitted by johnga1t

As input managers are in danger in Safari 3.0 and later versions, it might be useful to know that a type-ahead search feature that emulates Firefox can be enabled in Safari using a fairly simple hack that involves native OS X tricks.

To do so, quit Safari and go to System Preferences » Keyboard & Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts. Click the ‘+’ to add a new shortcut, select Safari as the Application, Find… as the Menu Title, and a temporary (and arbitrary) shortcut as Keyboard Shortcut. (Note that this field does not allow a simple entry, such as ‘/’, but instead requires a modifier key like Command or Option.)

Now go to ~/Library/Preferences and edit com.apple.Safari.plist. (You may be able to just double-click and open the plist in Property List Editor if you have Xcode installed.) Find the NSUserKeyEquivalents entry and edit the string entry for Find…, replacing the arbitrary shortcut you entered earlier with /. This will remove the need for a modifier key, and allow / to activate search.

Now relaunch Safari and type /; you should see the Find box appear, emulating the type-ahead search in Firefox.

via macosxhints.com – Emulate Firefox’s type-ahead search in Safari .

Do you find it a chore to delete a message in Gmail?  Or, do you prefer to use the keyboard rather than moving from mouse to keyboard and back again?

I do.

Here is a handy hint to help, I’ve just revolutionised the way I use Gmail with a few simple keystrokes:

Go to Settings
Go to Labs
Activate Keyboard Shortcuts (you may have to click on settings again to refresh)
Choose Keyboard Shortcuts from within Settings
Locate “Move to Trash” and set it to be “-” (a minus sign)
Locate “Mark as Unread” and set it to “§” (or whatever is the key below the Esc key)

Now from your inbox simply hit the minus key to delete the message, or from within a message, hit minus and it’s gone, moved to Trash in easy one step no mouse needed – or of course you can hit ‘y’ to archive it.
When you delete a message whilst reading it your inbox is then re-displayed.

So, I go: enter (to read) “y” or “-” to archive/trash and then enter again to read next one (and repeat).

It’s *so* quick as” -” and enter (on numpad) are co-located – it’s easy.

Use “§” to mark a a message as unread (I do this if I want to revisit the message for actioning as I keep my inbox empty).  I use the § key as it’s a similar location to Esc and I use it to “escape” back to the inbox leaving the message unread.

Of course, if easier, you can choose other keys if you find them more suitable but make sure they aren’t already allocated to another function.

Occasionally, when using iTunes (if iTunes has previously crashed), I come across a fault: iTunes won’t quit, it just reloads itself each time I try to close it. This issue also prevents my Mac from restarting/rebooting unless I do a quick and dirty cold restart (either using the 10s power button method or dropping to a terminal window and issuing a ‘sudo shutdown -r now‘ terminal command).

Further investigations have discovered that the SRS Labs iWow plug-in (see my previous post) is to blame:

Here is some background

Read the rest of this entry »

Web sites often display pop-up windows, or forms, and suppress the location (address) bar so you cannot see where you’ve been routed to, or the full address of the page that has popped up.

Occasionally, you may close the main Safari window by mistake leaving you with only the pop-up window and no obvious way to edit the address, or to enter a new address.

By pressing Command ⌘ + L Safari will re-display the location bar. This is a simple but very handy trick to wrestle back control of your browser. It’s got me out of a fix on many occasions