MacOS – Undo use of F5 which added a thick black line around fields and buttons

I was in the same position ¾ years ago and went ahead and loaned Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Pogue, David. O'Reilly).

It introduced all basic things what an imaginary OS X Snow Leopard manual could had included, albeit it isn't written in a conventional manual style. It is good for OS X newbies, as I was, because it explains even some rather elementary features/operations.

The Missing Manual doesn't cover Windows vs. OS X in a too great detail, which is, in my opinion, good thing as it makes you learn OS X from the ground up and makes you work with your operating system more intuitively (ie. you don't think Windows operations first and then translate them to Mac OS operations, but rather think of how things are done in the Mac OS straight away).

The downside was that the basic aspects of OS X were rather easy to learn with 10+ years of experience of other operating systems. It also introduced the majority of bundle apps, of which some were uninteresting to me (like iChat). The book was relatively fast to skim through.

The best part was the 6-page keyboard shortcut appendix to which I returned more times than any other chapter.

I can recommend the book — perhaps not to be bought, but to be read. If your local library has it in its collection, it's worth a visit.

Note that OS X Lion is due to be released later in this month. I strongly recommend to hold back buying the book now: either wait for a massive price drop or buy the book used; or wait for Lion books to land, if you're about to upgrade.

There is no default way or the right way and whatever you're comfortable with at present should be fine. However, using crazy combinations can give you an injury worse than an emacs pinky, so it might be worthwhile to check what others use. Here's what I do:

• Left thumb for the left ⌘
• Left middle finger for the left ⌥
• Left ring finger for ⌃
• Pinky for the left Shift
• Pinky for fn

For simple modifier + one key combinations, I use the modifier key in the appropriate half of the keyboard. While it's still thumbs for the ⌘ keys, I find it easier to pivot about the ring finger for ⌥.