Blackboard Tip: Have Messages Delivered via Email

Ferris State University uses Blackboard (sadly) for its online classes. For a while, there were times that I didn’t know if I was receiving a message from a teacher or other student. After digging through the settings, I found an option to automatically forward all messages to my personal email account. Continue Reading…

Terminal Tip: Symbolically Linking Wildcard Filenames

I am currently researching a Dropbox-based preference syncing solution for Mac OS X. In my research, I came across a really handy terminal tip. If you want to symbolically link (ln –s source target) a file or folder to another location that follows a named pattern, such as com.adobe.*, you can supply the pattern for the link source parameter. Continue Reading…

Mac Tip: Navigate Text by Word

If you use a Mac, there are tons of text navigation tools at your disposal. One of the little known is navigating text by word:

• Move your cursor between words: alt + Left or Right Arrow Key. This lets you jump between words in a sentence. This is helpful when you find that you mistyped a word earlier in a sentence, and you don’t want to use your mouse to move your cursor to the right spot.
• Move your cursor between paragraphs: alt + Up or Down Arrow Key. This lets you jump to the beginnings and ends of paragraphs, and is very useful when navigating large amounts of text.
• Delete the previous word: alt+delete. If you want to delete the last word you typed, this combination is handy.
• Delete the next word: alt+forward delete (fn+delete on laptops). Similar to the previous tip, this deletes the word in front of your cursor.

Do you have any other text navigation tips?

Update: Added the paragraph navigation tip.