When I was messing around with Keyboard preferences I looked at the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in Keyboard & Mouse prefernces. You never really read a list like this, but I happened to see something that caught my eye. Dictionary had a system wide keyboard shortcut! The hell does that do? Highlight any word in a web page or a text field, then press Command-Control-D and see what I have in the screenshot here. That rocks! I was right-clicking (yes on a Mac, either with a mouse or with two fingers on the trackpad, which I like far better than two different buttons on the laptop) and selecting Look up in Dictionary which would launch the Dictionary app. I also would use the Dictionary Widget on Dashboard, but this keyboard shortcut is exactly what I want and it was here all along in Tiger. Note: If you press Command-Option-D by accident, that hides the Dock. I also use that very frequently when I want to focus on getting some work done.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Tip: Quickly lookup any word in Dictionary inline with a pop-up
When I was messing around with Keyboard preferences I looked at the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in Keyboard & Mouse prefernces. You never really read a list like this, but I happened to see something that caught my eye. Dictionary had a system wide keyboard shortcut! The hell does that do? Highlight any word in a web page or a text field, then press Command-Control-D and see what I have in the screenshot here. That rocks! I was right-clicking (yes on a Mac, either with a mouse or with two fingers on the trackpad, which I like far better than two different buttons on the laptop) and selecting Look up in Dictionary which would launch the Dictionary app. I also would use the Dictionary Widget on Dashboard, but this keyboard shortcut is exactly what I want and it was here all along in Tiger. Note: If you press Command-Option-D by accident, that hides the Dock. I also use that very frequently when I want to focus on getting some work done.