So I just got a new fully loaded MacBook Pro 17″ and a 25″ monitor to go along with it. This is HOT.. definitely worlds better than a PC, and I used PC for like 15 years hating on macs until I actually got one (go figure lol). It’s just way more solid in general, no stupid registry.. going back to PC and it feels like a house of cards. Everyone says the downside to Mac is it’s forced and not extremely customizable (at the benefit of it’s security and solidity), but in my opinion I haven’t come across a single thing I couldn’t customize with bash or some other script, program, easy edit. I have spent the last week or so finding all my favorite shortcuts, tweaks, and so on.

I thought I’d share these with you … Plus give you some other tips about programs if you hadn’t heard of them already. Leave any additional tips you know in the comments!

First, my favorite hotkeys:

⌘+, (comma) Open preferences of current program. I use this hotkey probably the most, and it’s definitely up there on my favorites
⌘+Shift+4 (and 3) If you do 4 it will do a selective screenshot and save it ans a png to your desktop. Just drag an area after you hit it. If you do 3, it will take the entire screen.
⌘+F3 Show desktop. Allows you to edit files on desktop, then click to return to your current application setup. I don’t like to have things save to my download folder by default, so I put them on the desktop. It makes it easier right after I download something to delete it.
⌘+Option+I If you have multiple files selected and want to see the total file size (without having each ‘get info’ window open separately for each file), hit this.
Control + D This is the same as window’s ‘delete’ key (forward deleting rather than backwards deleting). The full size mac keyboard has a second delete key, but if you have the short keyboard and are used to the ability to delete what’s on the right of the cursor, this is for you.
⌘+Space This is for spotlight, although I often times hear words and I’ll want to know what it means, and spotlight hooks right into the dictionary app, so you can basically use the dictionary in one click rather than going to dictionary.com.

Misc. Tweaks:

Repair Disk Permissions: Go to Apps > Utilities > Disk Utility. Then hit the little icon that says repair disk permissions. Mine found like 200 errors. Do that once a month
Toggle hidden files in finder: This one I googled and I set up an automator script, but the site isn’t working. if you are interested let me know and i’ll post it up. it works in the open dialogue box, but not in Finder. This script makes it work in finder.
Adium Duck Icon: Adium is the hotness, except I hate that stupid green duck at the bottom… to change the default adium stupidass duck dock icon, download any of these. My favorite was this one.
Chrome Buttons: By default when you get chrome mac, several key features are hidden by default. hit View > Always show bookmark bar to show your quick bookmark bar,  then hit ⌘+, to bring up system preferences (see I told you that was useful), and under ‘Toolbar’ check both checkboxes to show the Home button and the two control buttons on the right that let you easily access your downloads, saved passwords, etc.
iTunes file copy: This one isn’t really a secret most of you have prolly turned it off, but go to your settings in itunes and make it so it doesnt make a duplicate of every file you add into the itunes folder. this is just asinine as if you’re music collection is 20gb… it wastes an extra 20gb duplicating files.

Programs …
Here are some of my favorites. I have tried a LOT of different ones.

Transmission – This is by far the best torrent app I’ve found. Better than uTorrent, and the other random ones I can’t think of.
Coda – Another one that’s no secret. I like it better than Bbedit, textmate, textedit obviously, etc. Textmate was good except the way it color coded my files was completely wack (80% of the reason I use it for easy viewing). For example on php file types it only highlighted ‘if’ statements… pretty much useless.
YummyFTP – I’m kind of a nazi about having my things work efficiently. I loved FileZilla on PC, but on mac its severely lacking 2 things I use most. 1 being quick connect so that when I open the program I can connect to any one of my  hundreds of sites with one click. On Mac it forced you to open a dialogue box then click.. then click again. 2nd, it didnt allow right click immediate focus. you had to left click then right click a file to edit it on the server. 3rd it didn’t allow folders to be always at the top … YummyFTP does all those things and much more perfectly. Far better than cyberduck, fetch, filezilla, and a few other random FTP clients I’ve tried.
Little Snitch – Best firewall ever!!! Get this… extremely recommended. Thats all I can think of now.. I’ll add more as I think of them