Ennovy.org

Ha! All of this month I’ve only been updating this weblog on the weekends.

Anyway, there are some old memes on the Internet where people list

• The applications on their dock
• Their top 10 mac apps

It’s been fun going through everyone’s lists to see if there’s something that I’d like too. I’m probably going to do this meme soon. But right now I want to single out one mac app that I’ve found really useful these past few days.

As I mentioned in a previous post, being new to Macs and the OSX operating system, I had trouble with using the Home and End keys on the Mac because they work differently than on Windows. Thankfully people told me what to do. But I’ve been trying to finish up my EE extension, and I’ve come to realize that I really don’t like how it works. To get to the end of a line, you have to hold down the Command key and then press the right arrow key, or sometimes you can use Cmd+E. When I was coding away, I would hit the End key expecting to go to the end of the line and then suddenly I would find myself looking at the bottom of the screen, and my cursor is nowhere to be found. To get back to where I was, I have to press the backspace key and then Undo that. I found that having to type two keys instead of just one was slowing me down.

The other major adjustment was the location of the Ctrl and the Cmd keys. I actually managed to adjust to this one pretty easily. Instead of using my pinky finger, I use my thumb. But at work, I have to use Windows and go back to using the pinky finger.

I did a search on Google and found this article, which tells you how to change the key bindings on your computer. It worked, except only on certain applications – it didn’t work in Firefox for example. After more searching, I found an application called DoubleCommand. It provides a user interface for changing the key binding. With it, I was able to get Home and End keys to work like it does on Windows. I LOVE this. There are a whole lot of other options you can configure as well, such as swapping the Cmd and Ctrl keys (I’m not going to do that just yet though). And it’s free, too!