Archive for December, 2005

Home sweet home

In my continuing trend of hacking OSX to behave the way I want am accustomed to, I spent Monday night reclaiming my home and end keys. I knew I had seen this hack somewhere before, I just had to find it again. This comes courtesy of Aaron Adams, via The Tao of Mac:

To change the Mac’s home and end keys to behave like Windows, create a text file named /Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict (if the folder doesn’t exist, go ahead and create it) and add these lines:

/* Home/End keys like Windows */
{
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:";
"$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
"$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
}

Logout and login, and the home and end keys will work like Windows.

No more command-left. Oh frabjous day.

Restoring sanity to app switching

I finally got fed up with the way OSX handles application switching. Quite frankly, I missed the Alt-Tab ways of Windows, and set my mind to making that work on my Powerbook. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone in my desires, as someone has already written the exact program I need to do this. Please follow along…

  1. Download and install Witch.
    This will give you window-switching ala Microsoft via the alt-tab key. The Dock’s application switcher will still reside on command-tab. If you’re happy with this, then you’re done. If you’re like me, you’re going to want Witch to use command-tab, but this isn’t going to work without a bit of trickery.
  2. Download and install the Unsanity Application Enhancer.
    This will give you a nice framework for other hacks and such. For our purposes, this will allow us to continue on to step 3…
  3. Download and install Pulltab. Log out and back in.
    At this point, command-tab no longer belongs to the Dock. You are now free to go back into the Witch control pane and assign the “All applications” cycle keys to command-tab and shift-command-tab.

Sit back and enjoy Windows-style application switching…