An interesting SMS project over in India is proving to be popular with farmers. Twitter is a presence command line, YubNub an internet command line and IM bot systems like IMIS are coming out into the open. I for one spend most of my day between the Mac OS X terminal and a text-editor (which interestingly can run terminal commands.) When I use Gmail or Google Reader I use the keyboard almost exclusively. I wish WordPress had better keyboard support. Even when I am in Photoshop or Fireworks I find learning the keyboard shortcuts to be invaluable though in those two cases it becomes an even faster system of mouse and keyboard movements. Mac OS X with Quicksilver or even Spotlight is a god-send for launching applications and finding files.
Even Windows Vista has made some improvements by putting a search/run/command text-box in the Start menu. Now if only Windows would have a good command line as default (PowerShell requires extra steps, make it the default Microsoft.)
All in all the command line and the keyboard are reclaiming some lost-ground that the mouse ate.
I use TextMate for most of my working day. The TextMate Basics Tutorial is a good place to start to increase your proficiency with it. Here are a few of the more useful keyboard-shortcuts:
Another rather hidden feature is the incremental search. ⌃S or ⌃⇧S incrementally searches forward/backward as you type (the status bar will turn into an input field in that case).
⌃G (Text → Convert → To Opposite Case) with no selection will toggle the case of the character next to the caret and advance the caret. with a selection it will toggle the case of all the characters in the selection (and leave the selection in place).
Subversion Support is provided via this Bundle. Just checkout a directory or file from a Subversion repository, open it in TextMate and you can use this Bundle. All Subversion Commands use the same shortcut ⌃⇧A
Bookmarks are marked places in your document. ⌥⌘B (View → Gutter → Bookmarks) will show them in the gutter (the gray panel to the left of the editable area, containing line numbers etc.) You can create a bookmark with ⌘F2 (Navigation → Add Bookmark). This will put a star (★) in the bookmark column of the gutter for that line. You can then always cycle through your bookmarks with F2 (Navigation → Next Bookmark) and ⇧F2 (Navigation → Previous Bookmark).
So, F1 View → Fold Current Block
There are many more but it is best to add a few every week to your knowledge so they become automatic.
Since I do a lot of Ruby and CSS coding I need the # character a rather lot. It took me a few minutes to figure it out as it is not marked on the keyboard at all. All the chatter on the web says to use Alt+3 but that produces a £ character for me.
