Inspired by Neal Ford’s talk last weekend at the No Fluff Just Stuff conference in Seattle I have recently spent a little bit of time installing a bunch of utilities and setting up my MacBook Pro ‘just so’.  I’ve always hated using a mouse, it’s always so damn far away from my hands when they are settled above my keyboard.  But being relatively new to Mac OS X (I was previously mainly using Linux for about 5 years) I wasn’t aware of what could be done to prevent the need to reach for my mouse so often.

An interesting thing to note about the NFJS conference is that all the presenters were using Macs: the majority of the attendees were also using Macs.  So it was a great chance to pick up tips and tricks.

Anwho, the changes I made:

• Quicksilver – shortcuts to launching apps and sooooo much more
• OpenInTextMate – open the files or directories currently selected in Finder (Quicksilver trigger: alt-shift-m)
• OpenTerminalHere – open a terminal for the directory currently viewed in Finder (Quicksilver trigger: alt-shift-t)
• lselect – select a bunch of files based on glob expressions in Finder
• Zipeg – viewing archives without expanding them
• Global shortcut to pop-open finder – ctrl-alt-cmd-f
• Making IEs 4 Mac work with Outlook Web Access – Public Folders, Calendaring, etc.
  • Make sure you you have your WINEPREFIX pointing at the version of Wine IE is using (caught me for about an hour)
  • IE does monster my CPU, but at least I can book a meeting room myself (my team will be very happy about this)
• Grand Perspective – a tree map view of your harddrive – no productiviy boost in itself, but it allowed me to find large files I didn’t know I had and do some spring-cleaning.
• Witch – a better task switcher

Even whilst setting this stuff up I found myself naturally using the new shortcuts, so I’m very hopeful that my productivity will get a good boost for a moderate investment of time.