Mac OS X Hints Page 2 of 2

The insider’s tips you won’t get from Apple

Don’t settle for standard Finder font sizes

When you view a folder’s contents in the Finder, you can customize the font size by choosing View: Show View Options (Command-J). However, you’re limited to text between 10 and 16 points in size. What if you’d like a smaller or larger size? For instance, a smaller font will show many more entries when you’re in Column view (see screenshot below). A larger font might be useful if you use Icon view or have a limited number of items on your desktop. If you edit the Finder’s preferences, you can choose font sizes outside of Apple’s predefined range.

To start, navigate to / your user folder /Library/ Preferences, find com.apple.finder.plist in the long list of files, and drag and drop it onto TextEdit. Make a duplicate of this file before you start, in case you make a mistake.

The preferences file is quite large, but you’re looking for four particular things. The first thing to look for is the settings that control the desktop. Press Command-F to bring up the Find dialog box, type

DesktopViewOptions

in the search box, and click on Next.

If you don’t find any matches, close the file, click on your desktop, and then select View: Show View Options. Toggle one of the options twice and then close the window—this will write a DesktopViewOptions entry to your Finder’s preferences. Now reopen the file in TextEdit, search again, and look for this section:

Once you find these lines, you adjust the desktop’s font size by changing

to a larger or smaller number.

The next three options (called keys ) are all in one section of the file, so switch back to TextEdit’s Find window, type

StandardViewOptions

in the Find field, and click on Next. The three keys you’re looking for are

Nlsv

(List view),

clmv

(Column view), and

icnv

(Icon view). You’ll have to scroll to reach each one.

Ever wish you could cram more text into your Finder windows? You can if you edit the Finder’s preferences file. Here you see the Finder with the standard 12-point font (A) and the same window using a 9-point font (B).

Within each area, you want to find and modify the

FontSize

key, changing the values to the size you prefer. If you don’t see this key in a particular section, that means the Finder’s defaults haven’t been changed. The safest way to fix this is to close the preferences file, use the Finder’s View options to set a font size for the missing entry, and then reopen the preferences file.

When you’re done, use File: Save to save the modified file, and then quit TextEdit. To see your changes, you need to restart the Finder. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the option key and then click and hold on the Finder’s Dock icon until a contextual menu appears. Choose Relaunch to restart the Finder.

Examine your battery’s lifeline

Ever wish you could get more information about the state of your laptop’s battery? The Unix command

ioreg

displays the contents of the I/O Kit registry, which contains a ton of information about your machine. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) and type

ioreg -l | more

. You’ll see data on everything from CPUs to peripherals.

Buried deep in the output is information about your battery’s overall health and current charge, but it’s not easy to find on your own. Instead, let the Unix search tool

grep

do all the hard work for you. Just use this command:

ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity

The

-w0

flag tells

ioreg

not to truncate the output lines, and the

-l

flag is the

list

command, which is what actually generates the output. The pipe symbol (

) then sends the output to

grep

, which searches for any line containing the word

Capacity

. The output will look something like this:

| | | "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=3971,"Amperage" =18446744073709550895,"Cycle Count"=61,"Current"=2160, "Voltage"=11370,"Flags"=4,"AbsoluteMaxCapacity"=4200})

What does it all mean? The values you care about are

Cycle Count

(the number of times the battery has gone through a discharge-charge cycle),

Current

(the current charge in the battery),

Capacity

(the highest charge the battery can hold), and

AbsoluteMaxCapacity

(the battery’s original highest-charge value).

As your battery ages, the

Capacity

value will slowly decline in relation to

AbsoluteMaxCapacity

—the battery is losing its ability to take a full charge. If a battery is giving you very short usage cycles, you may need to replace it. You can find out by checking the

Capacity

value. The

Cycle Count

value shows what remains of your battery’s useful life. Studies indicate that PowerBook-style batteries have a useful life of between 300 and 500 cycles.

Secrets of the Application Switcher

Productivity mavens probably already know that you can press Command-tab to switch programs quickly in OS X 10.3 and later. But there’s a lot more to the Application Switcher.

When you press Command-tab, the icons for active programs appear at the center of your screen, in order of use from left to right. The program you’re currently using is in the leftmost position, the one you used before that appears to the right, and so on. This makes it very easy to toggle between two programs—for example, if you’re copying and pasting multiple items from Microsoft Excel to Word. Just press and release Command-tab. You don’t even need to wait for the window to appear; as soon as you release tab, you’ll switch to the prior program.

The standard method of moving between programs in the Application Switcher is to hold Command and just keep pressing the tab key. As you do, the selection moves left to right across the Switcher. What if you want to move right to left? The hard way is to hold down Command-shift-tab. An easier method is to press Command-tab once and then press the backtick key (`) while continuing to hold Command. That’s one less key to press, and it’s much easier on the fingers.

Depending on your predilection, you can try other means of navigating the panel. If you have a scroll wheel, activate the Application Switcher by pressing Command-tab, and then spin the wheel while holding down Command. Or just move the mouse itself, and the cursor will highlight each application icon it touches. You can also use the left- and right-arrow keys to navigate across the Switcher. The home and end keys will jump to the left and right ends of the Switcher, and you can activate a selected application by either releasing Command or pressing enter.

Finally, here are two keyboard shortcuts you can use with the Switcher. After you press Command-tab, hold down Command and press H to hide the highlighted application. Press Q, and the program will quit instead. This is a great way to quit all your apps at the end of the day—just press Command-tab once to bring up the Switcher, then keep pressing Q (no need to press tab again, as the Switcher will move through the list as each program quits).