Tim, Author at Tim Leland

How to Show Hidden File on a Mac

July 17, 2018July 17, 2018 Tim Leave a comment

In the past, the only way I knew how to show hidden files on a mac was to run a terminal command which I had the commands show and hide aliased to.

# Show/hide hidden files in Finder alias show="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true && killall Finder" alias hide="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false && killall Finder"

This works great but is not the easiest command to remember and you have to open a terminal to run them. With the release of macOS Sierra Apple added a Finder keyboard shortcut that makes it possible to quickly show all the hidden files and folders. You just need to do the following:

Open the Finder
Browse any folder with hidden files
Hold down Cmd + Shift + . to toggle showing and hiding of files

This tip came from another great episode from Syntax.fm podcast. Be sure to check it out!

How to Unshorten Short Urls

July 2, 2018July 1, 2018 Tim Leave a comment

Several months ago I created a site called LinkUnshorten with the goal to guard people against short links from sites like goo.gl, bit.ly, tinyurl etc. Url shorteners are great but they do have the risk of redirecting you to a site you may not want to visit. LinkUnshorten solves this issue by expanding short links to show you the final redirect URL. I also made a chrome extension that will detect short links. Read More

Speed Up Key Presses (macOS)

June 7, 2018July 1, 2018 Tim 2 Comments

A recent episode of Syntax, the podcast about web development from Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski, a tip was mentioned on speeding up key presses on macOS. I have always been annoyed at how slow the cursor moves when navigating a large text file. After a simple change in the keyboard settings, I’m much happier with the speed of the cursor. It makes navigation large files much easier. If you are a developer, I would highly recommend making these changes.

If this is not fast enough for you, you can manually set them with these 2 commands(source)

defaults write -g InitialKeyRepeat -int 10 # default minimum is 15 (225 ms)
defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 1 # default minimum is 2 (30 ms)

Let me know if this helps you. Leave a comment below.

Chrome Extension Keyboard Shortcuts

June 4, 2018June 3, 2018 Tim 15 Comments

Wanted to share a quick tip on using keyboard shortcuts to activate chrome extensions. Up until now it never occurred to me to use a keyboard shortcut to activate an extension, but thanks to a user of my weather extension, I now have command + Ctrl + W mapped to open Weather. To setup your own keyboard shortcuts, browser to chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Leave a comment below of what other keyboard shortcuts you prefer.