This isn’t a blog post. It’s just a page that I’ll use to keep track of things I use on my mac and useful stuff I find on the Internet.

Applications

  • Cheatsheet displays all the keyboard shortcuts of the program in use
  • Flow a minimalistic pomodoro-timer app!
  • Gifski to convert videos to GIFs
  • IINA my favourite media player
  • Rectangle to quickly resize windows from keyboard
  • Spark my email client
  • Visual Studio Code my favourite code editor

Tweaks

Remove screenshots shadow

If you don’t care about the floating look that macOS gives to screenshots, you can disable it by terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true; killall SystemUIServer

To roll back:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false; killall SystemUIServer

Reduce screenshots size

It is possible to significantly reduce the size of screenshots asking the utility to produce JPEG files instead of PNGs (transparent background will get lost though):

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg; killall SystemUIServer

To roll back:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png; killall SystemUIServer

Remap keyboard keys

Even though there is some software to perform this operation automatically, like Ukelele and Karabiner, there is a manual way to remap keyboard without needing additional software.

In my case, I had problems with two keys of a US-Intl. layout that, being sold in Europe, ` and ~ that were, respectively, remapped to § and ±. I solved this following the best answer given here.

Note that the snippet of code needs to be run after every system restart, but this can be carried out automatically using Automator (give a look here). Also, the code must be run when the keyboard is connected to the mac. If you are working with a bluetooth device, like me, I figured it out that having a prompt window at system startup waiting for user’s input to manually confirm that the bluetooth device interested by this remapping is ready and connected, is the easiest (implementation-wise) solution (to me).