Opening Files and Folders With the Enter Key in OSX Finder
Just got my first Apple computer, a Macbook Pro a few days ago. One of the few things that has been annoying me are the keyboard shortcuts in Finder for navigating around. In Firefox I press Apple-Left and Apple-Right to go back in forward, so to make Finder act more like my browser I went to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts and added two new ones for Finder.app, mapping “Back” and “Forward” to the shortcuts I wanted. Almost there, but pressing Enter on a file or folder and having it want to rename the item instead of open it really annoyed me. I won’t get in to a rant on the contextual meaning of the Enter key in a file navigation program, the fact is that I often open files and folders and rename them only a fraction of the time so I want to press a single key to open things. My friend who is an engineer at Apple gave me these instructions:
- Create a shortcut for “Open” just like “Back” and “Forward”, and map to something not in use like Ctrl+X
- Run “open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist” in Terminal
- Find the NSUserKeyEquivalents branch, and then find the entry for Open
- Open TextEdit and press Enter to create a newline, and copy the newline by dragging from the first line to the second line and copying
- Back in the shortcut for Open, erase the Ctrl+X binding and paste in the newline character
- Close and save. To make the changes take effect I had to kill Finder at the Terminal, you could also reboot OSX to make the new bindings take effect
August 16th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Sounds rather un-Mac-like to me, having to modify macro files and copy and paste invisible control characters from one file to another.
Hey, wanna join the facebook libsecondlife group?
Do you remember the Copybot Defeater, a thing that spammed people with !quit messages in SL?
Seems like someone wrote a client made with libsl for the purpose of identifying the owner of this thing, and my memory says it was you. Even if it wasn’t you, maybe you remember where to get a copy of the source code for it.