Maybe my favorite hidden Mac feature

Did you know about the built-in dictionary? This is in OS X since Tiger: It’s a weird key combo, but it’s sooooo cool: In Mail or TextEdit or Safari — any good Mac app (which excludes, par exemple, MS Office 2004 but includes Office 2008) — put your cursor over any word, and hold down ctrl-command-D. Cool, huh? (The “command” key is now called that on newer keyboards; it used to be the key with an apple and a squiggly thing.)

Now move your cursor over other words while holding down those keys. Notice that there’s a thesaurus in the drop-down that says “Dictionary.” Now tell me that’s not friggin’ sweet.
January 18, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

Comments

3 Responses to “Maybe my favorite hidden Mac feature”

  1. Sean on January 19th, 2008 1:36pm

    Holy carp! That’s friggin’ sweet.

    Is that documented anywhere, or are people just supposed to discover it somehow?

  2. The Mac Whisperer on January 19th, 2008 3:36pm

    It’s buried in Help in Dictionary.app. Like everything else (on any OS, I suppose), one has to be either a) optimistically trawling for a specific feature or b) scouring the various sites like macosxhints.com on some kind of regular basis.

    BTW, I made a big boo-boo typo: It’s ctrl-COMMAND-D, not ctrl-option-D.

  3. Karl on January 22nd, 2008 5:15pm

    Alleluiah! Wait did I spell that write? Let me ctrl-COMMAND-D it. Oops. No it’s wrong…

Leave a Reply




*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word