Optimize your time with the command line 04/07/11

 

Terminal is avoided by non-coder types (like myself) because it’s language can seem so confusing.  But there are simple Terminal commands that we can run that will speed up our time in the edit suite.  I recommend viewing the 18 minutes worth of Terminal tutorials videos (Chap. 12) on Lynda.com.  You will feel more comfortable (and maybe a little excited) about trying a few commands.
Press CMND + SHIFT + U.  This will open the Utilities folder.     

 

Open Terminal.

 

Enable The Path View In Finder

Wouldn’t it be great to know the file path of every window in OS X?  Now you can.  Enter the following into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Now all of your open windows will display their file path.

 

 

Enable Quit In Finder

Ever get the “spinning beach ball of death”?  Maybe a better question would be how many times a day do you get it.  Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could “quit” the finder the way you can in any other application?  With Terminal all things (within reason) are  possible:

defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES

killall Finder

 

Your Finder menu should now look like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Add Spaces to Your Dock

I don’t know about you but I have so many apps that the icons for them are tiny in the dock.

 

 

Paste the following command in Terminal and a space will magically appear in your  dock.

 

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{tile-data={};

tile-type=”spacer-tile”;}’

killall Dock

 

Keep pasting this in Terminal if you want to add more spaces. Terminal will create the space by the Terminal dock.  BUT, you can drag the space any where you want in your dock.

 

 

 

 

Now I have my dock separated into Adobe, Apple and Avid products.

(This hack is thanks to John over at Tentblogger).

Tips: There are other Terminal commands that could be useful to us as video editors.  But because of the impact they could have on your system they should be used with extreme caution.  Anytime you invoke the sudo command in particular be very careful.  There are ways to Show Hidden Files In Finder and to Re-index Spotlight to fix wonky results.  You can check out these and more at 12 Cool Terminal Commands for OS X.