Tag Archives: mac-tips

How to use Keyboard Maestro to add hotkeys for Twitter lists in Twitterrific

With the addition of Tweet Marker support, Twitterrific has become my go-to Twitter client on my Mac. Aside from Tweet Marker support, one of my favourite things about Twitterrific is its very well thought out set of keyboard shortcuts.

Unfortunately, though Twitterrific does a nice job supporting Twitter Lists, there are no keyboard shortcuts to switch your timeline view to look at them. There are keyboard shortcuts to switch to All Tweets (⌘1), Mentions (⌘2), Messages (⌘3), and Favorites (⌘4), but that’s it.

The good news is that you can use Keyboard Maestro to add in the missing keyboard shortcuts. You simply set up a set of macros that are available only in Twitterrific, then use the Move or Click Mouse action to click on the appropriate list. Since your macros will only run when Twitterrific is the active application, you can use ⌘5, ⌘6, etc. as your shortcuts.

I like to keep the sidebar hidden in Twitterrific, so I added the keystroke ⌘L before and after the automated click, which shows the sidebar just long enough to allow the action to occur.

Making Lion feel faster

While most of the changes to OS X Lion are improvements, one added feature is a source of frustration for me. No, it’s not that the scrolling direction has been reversed; I actually really like that change. It’s some new animations that Apple has introduced.

Specifically, when opening a new window anywhere in the OS, and when replying to emails in Mail. When you open a new window, the window animates expanding open from the centre of the screen, and when you reply to an email it shows the reply jumping out of the original email and forward for you to type in.

While the animations are well done, they take time to happen, making Lion feel slightly slower than Snow Leopard was when windows would simply open immediately. To gain back that perception of speed, you can disable these unnecessary animations. All it takes is pasting a command into your Terminal window.

To disable the new window opening animation, paste the following into Terminal:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

And to disable the reply animation in Mail, paste the following into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES

Thanks to John Siracusa and Shawn Blanc for publicizing these settings.

[Update] I just found out that MacStories has these plus a bunch of other useful Lion tips that are worth checking out.