Use the Keyboard, Luke

March 25, 2006 - 7:52am

Question

I’m a recent switcher (<1yr) and i’m lovinc the mac platform so much that i now have a PB15”, 1.25mini, and soon to get a 17” Intel iMac (plus my 3 ipods in various configurations).
One thing that i can’t quite get used to after switching though: when you boot to windows the mouse cursor starts smack-dab in the middle of the (primary) monitor. Much to my distress, OS X starts the cursor in the upper left cand corner of the (primary) monitor.
Is there any way to change this? I’d love my cursor to start over the login window to save me that valuable 0.5 seconds a day that i have to move the mouse 6 inches to the middle of the screen.

Thanks,
Mark Rickert

Answer

Press tab. Use the arrows to pick the name or they keys to type it, and then tab, and then enter the password. Watch for the focus ring around the text area to know where you’re typing if you get lost. Shift-tab goes backwards through the interface items.

You’ll save more than half a second if you start to use the system like this. The largest delay in using a computer is not how far you have to mouse or how much you have to type, but actually changing the input device from keyboard to mouse and back. Do absolutely everything you can with the keyboard until you must use the mouse, and then do everything you can do with the mouse until you must use the keyboard. I scroll with my Mighty Mouse ~~cli~~ ball and I scroll with the page up/down keys. It simply depends on the last input device I used.

In short, worrying about the location of the pointer is the wrong concern. Worry about why you care, first.

About Adam Knight

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Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.

In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Photonic) and has a few other toys coming out soon.

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March 25, 2006 - 3:52pm

diamondsw said

It should also be noted, the only reason the mouse started up there to begin with was because in a single-user universe (or an auto-login one) that ends up being right over the Apple Menu. Not exactly the center of launching and such that it used to be, however.

Keyboarding with a GUI is always the fastest way to go.

March 25, 2006 - 10:46pm

Matt Schinckel said

You can also, if you have a login list, type the first character of the login name, which will then be hilighted, before typing the password and pressing return.

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