Keys to the Kingdom

07:42 Sunday, 24 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 48.6°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 15.32mph
Words: 576

Serendipity is a thing in my life. I like to think of it as the universe kind of offering me clues, something that requires, or rewards, attention.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about my lack of facility with keyboard combinations, despite some amount of "trying." I even installed Karabiner Elements on my 27" iMac. I haven't installed it on either of the MacBook Pros that replaced it. I also hold an incredible amount of affection for LaunchBar, one of the first apps I installed for Mac OS X a long time ago in an apartment far, far away.

Said affection has not made me very proficient with it, I'm afraid.

Anyway, back to serendipity.

Some hours after writing about MacOS X Guru's BBEdit 16 review, I happened upon this post from Kottke. (I'm way behind on my feeds, but maybe I was right on time? Or, just in time?) That post pointed to this, which turns out to be a wealth of riches on keyboards and the joys of using them. (Click through to the archives and enjoy.)

I've been making significant use of Captain's Log every day. There's a little more friction than I'd like, and I've been "meaning to" address it. I have FastScripts, which allows you to add keyboard shortcuts to scripts in the FastScripts menubar app. My reluctance to finally do so is perhaps explained by my previous disappointment and lack of success with assigning keyboard shortcuts to other things.

But serendipity was in the air, along with the rain, yesterday. Because I recalled a post by macosxguru about Alfred, a LaunchBar clone, and its utility in freeing up keyboard shortcuts. And since I love LaunchBar, I decided I needed to figure out how to make LaunchBar launch scripts. In the process of figuring that out, I learned that LaunchBar wasn't indexing my Scripts folder, so I fixed that. Then I learned you can assign an abbreviation (keyboard shortcut) to particular items in LaunchBar's index.

So now when I want to send a bookmark to Captain's Log, I open LaunchBar and type BL (bookmark to log) and the script runs. I'll assign ML to the Mail to Log script, and FL to the "File to Log" script, and IL to the "Idea to Log" script.

Why not just use a hyper-key assignment of some kind? Because I want to use LaunchBar more often and become more proficient at taking advantage of its utility. It saved my bacon not long ago when I was using the clipboard manager in Unclutter and I accidentally deleted the clipping I was looking for. For a reason I no longer recall, finding the source of that clipping was going to be difficult, so I invoked LaunchBar and started typing clipboard. When Clipboard History appeared, I right-arrowed over and found the clipping I was looking for! I don't think I've ever used LaunchBar's keyboard history feature before, though I did recall it had one.

Now I want to try and retrain myself to use LaunchBar's clipboard manager. Unclutter is a cool app, and I've used it a lot over the years. The other feature I use quite a bit is to stash bits of text in the notepad feature. But the key to proficiency is repetition, so I should focus on LaunchBar.

Anyway, that was kind of fun yesterday afternoon. "Fun" not being something I often association with using the Mac anymore.

More of that, please.

✍️ Reply by email