The Fulcrum of Mac Productivity: Hotkeys

To be productive we wish to do as much as possible from the keyboard, and that means that we’d like to use hotkeys as much as we can, because they make things happen with a single or a few keystrokes. I’ve emphasized the words “or a few” because I have concluded that QuickSilver is the foundation of keyboard productivity and it usually requires several keystrokes for QuickSilver to make something happen.

On my Mac, to launch Skype for example, I type Command-Space, then the three letters; S K Y. That’s because if I typed just two letters; S K, QuickSilver would launch SketchBox. With QuickSilver you sometimes have to type an extra letter or two to filter down to what you want.

You will also have noticed that all Mac apps have hotkeys, but these are always a single key combination, such as Command O for Open. The single key combination is actually a limitations, which is one of the reasons I’m recommending iKey. iKey is a perfect complement to QuickSilver if you use it right.

iKey: The Hotkey Productivity Aid

There are other Mac programs similar to iKey, but iKey was the one that I tried out in depth. iKey is a kind of wizard based programming environment where you never have to write a line of code. You just select various options and type in the keystrokes. You use it to script keyboard entries and to script mouse movements. You can specify whether the script applies to all applications or just to a specific application. You can then attach whatever script you have created to a Hotkey combination.

So part of iKey’s charm is that you can attach a script to either 1 or 2 keystrokes. This means that if you want to put Save As on to two keystrokes, say Command S then Command A, you can. The most difficult part of setting up hotkeys is finding key combinations that you will remember, so having the possibility of using two keystrokes rather than one is a big help.

I have included the screenshot above to provide an illsutration of using iKey to build a script. You can see three Windows. The top one is the catalog of all the hotkey scripts I have set up. The window in the middle is the series of commands in the script I am creating. What I’m actually doing in this example is writing a script to control how FireFox creates a new window.

• So the first step in the script is to tell the keyboard to type Command n.
• The second step tells FireFox to wait 2 seconds. This gives more than enough time for FureFox to display the new window.
• The Third step is to tell the mouse what to do to make the window the size I want and then move it to the place I want.

For the purposes of illustration, I’ve clicked on the third step to bring up the third window. This is a set of mouse commands. It tells the mouse where to move to and to drag the corner of the new window (to get it to be the right size) and then to drag the whole window to the place I want it.

If you’re wondering how I know what the locations I want are, it’s because I have another piece of software called Free Ruler which puts a pixel ruler on the screen. So I can find out the co-ordinates of any part of the screen or of a window.

Hopefully this gives you a flavor of iKey.

Using iKey

In theory you can use iKey to create workflows from one application to another. I never use it in that way. Here’s why. Scripts between applications can easily go wrong because of unpredictable factors. I’ve tried doing this and had the workflow fall apart or simply not work. So if I decide to script workflows, I’m going to use AppleScript, because with that you’ve got full command of the whole desktop.

But, imho, that doesn’t take anything away from iKey. iKey, in conjunction with QuickSilver and OS X, gives me full control of hotkeys and shortcuts, and that means that I can make the Mac a remarkably productive environment.

Click on this link: PDQ Mac to see a list of other postings on Apple Mac productivity.