Roberto Carvajal » Mac Tips

Safari 4 Google Search Shortcut

Roberto — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:27:54 +0000

By default Safari 4 has a very annoying shortcut to use the Google Search box and I am already used to the ⌘K shortcut that Firefox has, to fix this we are going to use the same program I showed at my previous tip: Switching Safari Tabs With Custom Shortcuts.

So, if you haven’t already done so, go get Spark, open it and hit the “All Application’s HotKeys” button in the middle of the screen, it should show up a drawer, click the + sign and add Safari to the list, with Safari selected double click “Menu Item” in the “HotKey Groups” pane, in there press “click to edit” add ⌘K or whatever shortcut you want, name it Google Search, hit the first drop down and select Safari again, and on the second drop down select “Edition -> Search -> Google Search…”, hit create and restart Safari, also make sure the Spark daemon is actually running.

That should be it, next time you press your shortcut you should be directly at the Google Search box.

Switching Safari Tabs With Custom Shortcuts

Roberto — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:04:48 +0000

So I dumped Minefield / Firefox a while a go to give a try to Safari 4 beta and I really love it, I love the speed and how perfectly integrates into OS X and with the brand new Web Inspector my life is complete, or is it?. Turns out one major flaw in Safari for me is the lack of fast switching into different tabs, Safari has the nice shortcuts ⌘1 to ⌘9 bound to the bookmarks in your bookmark bar instead of the tabs, like Firefox does. So after researching a bit I found a way to do it using QuickSilver + AppleScript but using QuickSilver was kinda of an overkill for me for such a simple task and also it started to crash and I could never recover. Instead a good friend of mine told me about Spark, it’s a light and free shortcut manager that let’s you define custom shortcuts per application and execute scripts / commands, that’s just exactly what you need.

The setup is simple, click “All Applications’s HotKeys” it will show a drawer, click the + button there, add Safari.

In there, hit ⌘1 to add a new AppleScript instruction, name it “Tab1″ and on the source write this:

  tell front window of application "Safari" to set current tab to tab 1

Click the shortcut button and setup your shortcut, I suggest of course for the first tab ⌘1

Hit save, and there you go, repeat that 8 more times changing the tab name, the shortcut and the last number on the AppleScript which refers to the tab name.

Also, as a goodie, I added the LastTab shortcut bound to ⌘0

  tell front window of application "Safari" to set current tab to last tab

After you are done, go back to to Safari and test your brand new custom shortcuts to switch tabs.

Yes, now go ahead and tell your friends!.

Update: I figured out how to do the ⌘K shortcut for the Google Search box in this post: Safari 4 Google Search Shortcut

Pimping Terminal

Roberto — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:25:45 +0000

I’m a heavy Terminal user and I realize that Apple doesn’t really care about it because 99,9% of their users don’t even know what to do with it, Terminal only exists because Mac OS X is UNIX and it just has to be there. Having said that I still can’t quite understand why if it sucks so much I replaced my fine iTerm in favor of Apple’s solution despite 2 serious issues. Well that’s no longer the case thanks to Ciarán Walsh and his SIMBL plugins to fix the colors and the tab switching!

Please go ahead and follow his instructions:

Customising Colours in Leopard Terminal

Tab Switching in Terminal

Unfortunately I’m broke right now, but I’ll send you a donation (hopefully for beer) as soon as I can.

THANKS.