{"id":3481,"date":"2011-05-30T16:52:19","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T16:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=3481"},"modified":"2011-05-30T16:52:19","modified_gmt":"2011-05-30T16:52:19","slug":"two-ui-features-i-cant-live-without","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2011\/05\/30\/two-ui-features-i-cant-live-without\/","title":{"rendered":"Two UI Features I Can&#8217;t Live Without"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I jump between a Mac at home and Linux (GNOME) at work, but there are two features (unknown to far too many people!) on both platforms that I can&#8217;t live without:<\/p>\n<ul>\n    <li>The ability to &#8220;zoom out&#8221; all my windows and display smaller versions of them so I can rapidly jump around. On the Mac, this is called Expose, and I access it by pressing F9. In GNOME, I have it mapped to Ctrl+Shift+Up (non-standard IIRC), and it&#8217;s provided by Compiz Fusion. This is a pointless feature if you only have a couple windows open, but when you&#8217;re really getting into something and you have a dozen or more things going on, this makes switching so much less painful. It&#8217;s especially good if you need to switch to an application that has &#8220;fallen to the bottom&#8221; of your window stack, or if you won&#8217;t recognize it by window title (because you have five terminals open and want the one with all the red prompts which you&#8217;ll recognize as the production database server).<\/li>\n    <li>A launcher. For a long time, I&#8217;d launch most programs from the terminal, just because it was easier for me. If I wanted Firefox, I didn&#8217;t want to have to mouse over to the start menu and try to find it in a long list. I wanted to type &#8220;Ctrl+R, fir, Enter&#8221; and re-launch &#8220;firefox-bin &#038;&#8221;. (Sure, I could keep an icon on my desktop, but that implies that I don&#8217;t already have windows covering my desktop.) On the Mac, I use <a title=\"Alfred App for Mac\" href=\"http:\/\/www.alfredapp.com\/\">Alfred<\/a> for this, replacing <a title=\"Quicksilver Launcher for Mac\" href=\"http:\/\/qsapp.com\/\">Quicksilver<\/a>. In GNOME, it&#8217;s <a title=\"GNOME Do\" href=\"http:\/\/do.davebsd.com\/\">Do<\/a>. In both cases, pressing Alt+Space pops up the launcher window. I type a few characters to match the program I want and press Enter. All of these launchers are <a title=\"Alfred App Features\" href=\"http:\/\/www.alfredapp.com\/#alfred-features\">capable of far more<\/a> than this, but the mere ability to do this makes these apps worth their weight in gold. (Figuratively. Literally, they have no weight, which would make them worthless.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I jump between a Mac at home and Linux (GNOME) at work, but there are two features (unknown to far too many people!) on both platforms that I can&#8217;t live without: The ability to &#8220;zoom out&#8221; all my windows and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2011\/05\/30\/two-ui-features-i-cant-live-without\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}