Shortcuts of the old and minimalist

As I get older and grumpier, I increasingly value clean, uncluttered working environments. I’m sure I’m not the only one, so here’s a few useful practices and shortcuts that help me avoid using the mouse and satisfy my need for productivity micro-optimisation.

They are mainly for macOS users.

Hide everything

Adjust your system preferences to automatically hide the Dock and menu bar (there’s a checkbox in “General”).

With these two changes, a maximised window is effectively full-screen. Hit CTRL + ⌘ + F to officially enter full-screen mode and you’ll barely notice the difference.

Beware though: hiding the menu bar has a couple of downsides:

• It’s not obvious at a glance which application has focus, nor what the time is (I don’t wear a watch).

• The ⌘ + ⌥ + \ shortcut to open the 1Password desktop widget sometimes fails to work when the menu bar is hidden¹.

It’s still worth it.

Hiding the Dock has no downsides assuming you use Alfred to open applications.

A blank desktop

Keep ~/Desktop clear so that, combined with the above tips, your default view is something like this:

Scratch files live somewhere less visually intrusive (like, say, ~/Scratch). Let the macOS screen-capture program know of this decision with:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Scratch

Digression: any files in ~/Desktop can be hidden by enabling the “Quit” menu item for Finder:

defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool true
killall Finder

then quitting: ⌘ + Q. This is worth doing if only to remove Finder from the list of running applications seen with ⌘ + TAB.

Marshalling windows

Using the Spectacle window manager, you can use ⌘ + ⌥ + C to centre a window, then ⌘ + ⌥ + H to hide all others².

This allows a clean context switch: dropping all clutter in favour of rapidly focussing on one app — generally Chrome (for email), Trello or Slack — very useful.

There’s also:

• ⌘ + ⌥ + → and ⌘ + ⌥ + ← for shunting windows between the left- and right-hand half of a display, and;

• ⌘ + ⌥ + ↑ and ⌘ + ⌥ + ↓ for bumping windows between displays.

Memorise the equivalents for your favourite window manager.

Marshalling tabs

A verging-on-OCD minimalist like myself minimises both the number of applications open³ and, within a browser, the number of open tabs.

For the latter, there’s a useful Chrome extension that adds two crucial missing keyboard shortcuts.

First: ⌥ + ⇧ + O to “Close Other Tabs”⁴. Fortunately, this doesn’t close pinned tabs so you can protect your core web-apps (eg Gmail, Calendar, rain noise) with the second shortcut this extension provides: ⌥ + ⇧ + P, which pins the current tab.

Finally it’s sometimes useful to full-screen an individual tab for the complete “zen”-mode experience. Do this with CTRL + ⌘ + F (to full-screen the window) followed by ⇧ +⌘ + F. A good use-case for this is reviewing Github pull requests but any site that uses a fixed-width container would work well.

Further reading: Area Man Knows All The Shortcut Keys.