My MacOS X

A dark scary place full of text. That’s how it feels at first anyway. This is a selection of Terminal Commands that I have found particularly useful. Change settings for Spaces, Spotlight, Dock, Finder, Time Machine, System, etc that aren’t accessible through the application or system preferences. If you are just making your first forays into OS X Terminal land hopefully they will help you out.

Here are some very useful terminal commands and tips for hidden Mac OS X settings.

All subjects

• Finder
• Dock
• Spaces
• Desktop
• Time Machine
• Spotlight
• ISO CD/DVD
• Remote Desktop
• Network
• System commands
• Applications and processes
• Files management

tags: configuration, preferences, Terminal

Snow Leopard’s Terminal has a new very useful feature “SPLIT” / “COLLAPSE” as in many text editors. Check out the split/collapse window buttons here above the scroll bar:

Click the top “split” button or press Command+D shortcut and now you’ve got your window split into two usable panes like so:
To collapse the window press Command+Shift+D

ALso, you can do multiple splits. Aside from general speed increase I think split pane in Terminal is my new favorite feature.

See the Terminal Splits Windows Movie:

tags: short keys, Snow Leopard, Terminal, Text Editor

As most people are probably aware, the new QuickTime X Player in Snow Leopard has no preferences.

One of the preferences is greatly missed was to automatically start playing a movie when it was opened.

But you can re-enable that behavior with the following Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

The movie will now start when opened without you having to press the Play button.

tags: Terminal, video player