Power up your Mac’s input devices

1 Type accented letters

For fast access to accented letters, hold a letter key down to see a pop-up menu; press a number key to select the character in the corresponding position. Or, learn specific shortcuts in Keyboard Viewer (activated in the Keyboard tab of System Preferences’ Keyboard pane).

2 Keyboard access to menu commands

To access a menu command without navigating menus, press ç+ß+/ to bring up Help, and start typing the command’s name. Use the arrow keys to navigate the menu and ® to confirm. This is also great when you know the name of a command but don’t recall its whereabouts in an app’s menus.

3 Use Hot Corners

In the Mission Control pane of System Preferences, click Hot Corners. In the sheet that then appears, define what you want to happen when you move the mouse cursor into each corner. This can be a lightning fast way to trigger your screen saver.

4 Invest in a decent window manager

Don’t waste time precisely positioning windows – get a window manager to do it! BetterTouchTool offers options for this, but Moom ($10, manytricks.com) is better. Have it instantly snap a window to a user-defined area by using a keyboard shortcut or gesture, or by dragging out the desired position on the screen.

5 Open apps from the keyboard

BetterTouchTool enables you to set keyboard shortcuts to instantly open favourite apps or folders. The action to use is Open Application/File/AppleScript. Shortcuts that involve ≈+ß+[ letter] won’t clash with anything else.

6 Ditch your mouse

Mice are a dated input device, and poor ergonomically. Consider a trackpad so you can use gestures, or a pen-based tablet on which the surface is mapped to corresponding points on your display – then you can jump to a position by lifting the stylus and setting it down elsewhere.