Mac Kung Fu: 20 classic Mac tricks that you don’t know

You may be familiar with a handful of these tips. But my bet is that many of these will be new to you.

My favorite:

OS X actually contains two clipboards, although the second is much more primitive than the main one and will cut and paste only text. You won’t find it on any menus, either, and it is available only via two keyboard shortcuts. You can use it in the usual way by highlighting some text, using Control+K to cut the text, and pressing Control+Y to paste the content in the new position. (Note that’s Control and not Command; longtime Unix/Linux users will, of course, recognize this secondary clipboard as an implementation of the kill and yank tools found in the likes of Emacs.)

There’s no “copy” option, unfortunately, although you can emulate this by cutting the text with Control+K and then immediately pasting it back in with Control+Y, before moving to the new position where you’d like the text to be inserted and again pasting with Control+Y.

Only plain text is copied—any formatting such as bold or italics is lost. Additionally, although it should work fine within most OS X applications (but not the latest version of Microsoft Word, natch), it probably will not work if you cut text from one app to paste into another app—in my testing, each app seemed to have its own private secondary clipboard.

Have you ever found the need to scrub the styles from some styled text? This is a great way to do that. Select the styled text, then control-k and control-y. In all the applications I’ve tested, Undo appears to work, in case you change your mind.

[Via IHeartApple2.com]