One of the crucial necessities of being efficient on a new machine for me is to know a few often-used shortcut keys. It’s a nerdy programmer/analyst thing, but I love being able to navigate through the operating system without hardly touching the mouse. Some people think this is actually a sign of some sort of bizarre elitism — that geeks relish in the ability to memorize arcane shortcut keys as a sign of an implicit geek hierarchy (not too unlike the “Rock Snob”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0767918738/103-8439184-2867862?v=glance, for example). I think I have enough sense not to fall into that camp, though. :) Mousing over to an icon takes just enough context-switching to be distracting:

# You’re doing something interesting which requires lots of keyboarding (like blogging)
# You hear a crappy song on iTunes that you want to skip past
# You Command + Tab over to that window but…you had minimized it^*^
# At this point your brain goes “What? Where’s the window? Oh…” and your blogging (or whatever) slams to a halt
# You wave the mouse around a few times to figure out where it is
# You drag it down to the Dock
# Meanwhile, you’re brain is asking these subconscious questions:
## Is your aim accurate?
## What’s that other icon doing there?
## Is this the one I want?
# You click on the icon and the window maximizes
# You use a shortcut key to advance to the next track
# You Command + Tab back to what you were doing
# Brain: “What was I doing again?”

Anyway, for all my digging around and asking questions of Mac heads, I haven’t been able to figure out how to unminimize a window from the Dock without using the mouse. On Windows, you’d use the Window Key + M to minimize, and then you could use Alt+Tab to cycle back to your minimized window, which would automatically restore it to the previous window size. Not so with the Mac. While there’s a perfectly acceptable analog to Windows Key + M — in fact it’s Apple Key (“Command”) + M — there’s no good way to unminimize without using the mouse: Command+Tab won’t do it automatically.

I did some digging online and a quick Google search turned up these helpful pages:

* “Magical Macintosh Key Sequences”:http://davespicks.com/writing/programming/mackeys.html
* “A (Near)-Complete List of Mac Keyboard Shortcuts”:http://www.macobserver.com/columns/firstmac/2005/20050422.shtml
* “Keyboard Control”:http://homepage.mac.com/frakes/MOSXPT/content/keyboard.html

But, alas, no “unminimize” command.

^*^Actually, there is a way to unminimize iTunes by using Command + 1, but most other applications don’t use this shortcut.