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Tagged: software

Lego magician levitating the word "text:

productivity / technology

How to perform text manipulation magic with Keyboard Maestro

Have you ever found yourself making the same kinds of edits to text again and again? Many applications offer ways to streamline this process within the confines of the specific application. It gets more challenging when you want to transform text as it moves from one application into another. Keyboard Maestro — the Swiss army knife of Mac automation tools — to the rescue. Today I’ll walk through a couple of ways you can use it to manipulate text in the clipboard before pasting the text into another application. These macros use regular expressions. Regular expressions are a powerful pattern...

How to make ForkLift 3 the default file viewer

technology

How to make ForkLift 3 the default file viewer

A few people have asked me whether you can make ForkLift 3 the default application for file management tasks. You can, but the behavior can be inconsistent between different Macs. Changing this setting will cause applications that have a Reveal in Finder or Open in Finder command to redirect those actions to ForkLift. Commands from applications like Alfred and LaunchBar that display results in a Finder window appear in ForkLift instead. This works for the most part but the behavior isn’t always consistent. Some applications don’t use the operating system default setting and they will continue to do their own...

ForkLift 3 is the best dual-pane Finder replacement I've used

technology

Give your file management a boost with ForkLift 3

Before macOS Sierra, Finder had no option to list folders and files separately1. I’m still using El Capitan because of other dependencies and viewing folders mixed in with files really grinds my gears. And I still can’t understand the logic behind using return to rename a file or folder instead of opening it. Fortunately, several third-party Finder replacements have emerged to fill these gaps. Finder alternatives either extend Finder’s native functionality (like XtraFinder and Total Finder) or run as stand-alone applications (like ForkLift and PathFinder). XtraFinder was a capable solution to my gripes for several years. When Apple introduced System...

technology

Evoke the perfect atmosphere with Jukedeck’s new features

Jukedeck is a clever tool for creating unique, royalty-free soundtracks. These soundtracks add ambience to your video presentations without sounding like everyone else’s. Jukedeck has added a stack of new features since my earlier review. These additions give you more control over the composition, so the resulting soundtracks match the visuals even better than before. Edit existing compositions This is the one I was waiting for. You can now change your opus after you’ve created it! Before, you had to get everything right the first time. Each composition was a unique snowflake. There were a few times I’d generated the...

BetterSnapTool window position and keyboard shortcuts

technology

Mac convert tip #2: install a window manager

Hitting the Windows key together with one of the arrow keys provided a fast way to resize a window to fit the left or right half of the screen in the Microsoft world. For mouse users, dragging the window to the edge of the screen achieves the same result. This is really useful if you’re writing in one application while referring to research in another. I was pretty disappointed to find that OSX didn’t provide an equivalent capability. After a day or two of manhandling windows into position, I went looking for a better solution. Fortunately, there are numerous third...

Sort the Trash by Date Added to easily locate recently deleted files

technology

Mac convert tip #1: sort the trash by date

If I want to recover a file from the trash, I usually know pretty soon after it’s been deleted. Windows made it easy to sort the Recycle Bin by delete date. You can do this on the Mac too, but it’s not quite as obvious on OSX. Here’s how to sort the Trash with the most recently deleted files at the top. Open the Trash. Select View, Show View Options or press ⌘+J. Select Date Added to display the Date Added column. Click the Date Added column heading in the Trash window to sort in reverse date order. The most...