Filed under: TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Cancel stuff
No, I'm not talking about hitting the Cancel button. I'm
also not talking about hitting Esc. I'm talking about canceling operations. Ever had a page take forever to load, and
you just want Safari to cut it out? You don't really want to close the window, just stop loading whatever wacky CSS
business was loading. Hitting Cmd-Period (that's the Apple and the . key) will stop whatever active process is going,
usually it's indicated by a little blue progress bar. For instance, if you've ever gone to "Save for web..."
in Photoshop, but the image was enormous, that preview can take a minute to load. You can cancel this, resize, and then
preview, all without leaving the Save for web interface window. Using escape would have canceled the save, so cmd-period
has a little niche use here. Cmd-period does cancel things at times, in Finder and "standard" UI dialog boxes
where you have a Cancel or OK option. It's been around forever, as I remember cancelling things all the time on my
dad's SE/30— mostly because I'm an impatient snot. For added fun, cmd-period will open the CD tray when you're in
open firmware.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Josh said 7:11PM on 2-17-2006
That 'Cmd-.' in a Dialog box to select 'Cancel is new to me... great tip.
Reply
DJR said 9:00PM on 2-17-2006
It would be nice if Esc or Cmd-. actually worked most of the time. When a web page just refuses to load and borderline freezes my Mac, I find that the computer only heeds the command to stop once it's already stopped trying to load the page on its own. That's annoying.
Reply