Hack Faster with Secret Features

I love it when I stumble upon a new feature in a piece of software that makes my life easier. I hope you do too.

That’s why I’m going to take a bit to go over some of the useful things I’ve been finding lately.

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Gmail hotkeys

If you use Gmail labels (and you really should), then you’re going to love Gmail hotkeys. I’m not talking the basic stuff, like ‘c’ to compose a new message, or ‘r’ to reply to one. I’m talking full-blown keyboard control of your inbox.

You can use the ‘J’ and ‘K’ keys to move down and up in the inbox, respectively. This will move that little arrow guy on the left edge of your inbox list. I’m going to call him the ‘caret’.

You can press ‘X’ to select or deselect the caret’s current conversation. Once you’ve selected some conversations, you can press ‘L’ to add a label. Simply type the name of the label you want to add and hit enter, and your selected emails will be updated. Now that you’ve labeled your emails, you can hit the ‘E’ key to archive them.

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DTerm – Terminals everywhere

The terminal is one of a hacker’s most important tools. Now you can access it everywhere with DTerm, a nifty little utility that allows you to open a terminal at the current program’s working directory. Don’t miss out on that crucially cool little feature of it; it runs from the working directory.

If you use TextMate, for example, and you have a file open, compressing that file’s directory is as trivial as pressing Command+Shift+Enter and typing your favorite compression incantation. Or maybe you quickly want to check out a man page, hit the global hotkey again and man up.

Highly recommended: Download DTerm for free

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Block Selection in TextMate

You might have already known that you can block select text in TextMate by holding the Option key and selecting with your mouse. But this short little video could save you a lot of time in the future.

The YouTubez

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