Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Keyboard Control

Mac OS X offers a fantastic feature for anyone who believes that life is too short: keyboard-controllable menus, dialog boxes, pop-up menus, and even Dock pop-up menus. You can operate every menu in every program without the mouse or add-on software.

Panther, in fact, takes this concept to a new extreme. You can now operate every control in every dialog box from the keyboard, including pop-up menus and checkboxes. And you can even redefine many of the built-in Mac OS X keystrokes, like Shift--3 to capture the screen as a graphic.

In fact, Mac OS X 10.3 even lets you add or change any menu command in any program. If you’re a keyboard-shortcut lover, your cup runneth over.

GEM IN THE ROUGHUsing the Dock or Sidebar for Drag-and-Drop

The Mac is smart about the relationship between documents and applications. If you double-click an AppleWorks document icon, for example, AppleWorks launches automatically and shows you the document.

But these days, it’s occasionally useful to open a document using a program other than the one that created it. Perhaps, as is often the case with downloaded Internet graphics, you don’t have the program that created it, or you don’t know which one was used. This technique is also useful when opening a Read Me file into your word processor, such as Word, instead of the usual TextEdit program.

In such cases, the Dock is handy: Just drag the mystery ...