Ant Cooper
A quick tip to send a PDF straight to Evernote from the macOS print dialog, saving a few steps creating a file, importing, and deleting.
From the Print dialog, instead of clicking the PDF button, click on the dropdown arrow and check that Send to Evernote isn't already in the list (the name may be slightly different). If not, click Edit Menu… (1).
In the next dialog, click the + button (2) and select the Evernote.app in your Applications folder. You can double click this to change the name if you like (3).
Click OK and you can now use your Send to Evernote option every time you print.
Reclaiming the never-used § key at the top left of a British keyboard and turning it into the # I hit a hundred times a day.
I've been spending more time in Bear recently, migrating my old DayOne journal entries into a more portable system… and I've been doing a lot of headings and tagging which means I've been hitting that # symbol a lot.
On a macOS British keyboard layout this requires the option + 3 key combination, which requires a little keyboard gymnastics and interrupts my flow. Wouldn't it be better if there was a simple keystroke for this? Looking at the keyboard, I can't say that I've ever had cause to use the §/± key at the top left of my British keyboard. It'd be perfect if I could remap this to #.
After some searching, I discovered the hidutil in an Apple Tech Note that allows native keyboard remapping, but after some trial and error this only seems to allow mapping of single keys and not key combinations.
The next option I discovered was a free utility called Karabiner-Elements. This looked legitimate enough so I downloaded it to try it out. The installation process requires permission to allow it to run in the background and more alarmingly to monitor all keyboard input. I've nothing against the developers of this tool and I'm sure it's probably fine but giving that level of permission doesn't sit well with me and could present a security risk. So, that was a no go.
The final stop on this journey was with Ukelele, a tool I'd seen mentioned on a couple of other posts but which suggested it was no longer maintained. Thankfully this build provided by SIL has been kept up to date. Again, there is an inherent risk to downloading an unsigned application, but the difference here is that it's just a configuration tool that generates an XML keyboard layout file and isn't required to run in the background to remap the keys.
To cut a long story short, I followed a couple of simple steps and created a new British Markdown keyboard bundle that's identical to the standard layout except for swapping out the § symbol for #. This produced a simple British markdown.bundle file, provided as a zip file for your convenience below. After unzipping, if you wish you can right-click to choose Show Package Contents and check it's nothing more than a few text files and an icon.
British Markdown.bundle (zip)
First open Finder, click on the Go menu whilst holding down the option key to reveal the Library and drop the file into Library/Keyboard Layouts folder.
To enable this layout, open System Settings and go to Keyboard > Text Input and click the Edit button on Input Sources. On the modal window, click the + at the bottom left to add a new layout. Under English you should see the British Markdown bundle.
Add this and make sure Show input menu in menu bar is enabled. You should now be able to choose between your standard British keyboard and the modified one.
This makes writing markdown a lot more fluid. I just need to retrain my muscle memory now to use the new key rather than the old key combination. Unfortunately it's only a macOS solution. I'd like to find a way to replicate this on iPadOS too.
If the keyboard layout doesn't appear, you may need to restart or check in the Other section at the bottom of the Languages menu.
Apple Notes has gained plenty of features over the years, but not simple customisation — and that default link yellow fails a contrast check badly. Here's how to fix it on macOS, and improve it on iOS and iPadOS.
Despite blithely using Evernote as my Second Brain and for most of my notes, I still use Apple Notes on occasion. While it's gained more features over the years, one thing that really irritates me is the lack of simple customisation, especially the awful yellow colour of links.
Perhaps it's just me and my colour blindness but it does seem an odd choice. You'd think that someone at Apple would notice it's really bad, or at least provide an obvious way to change it across all platforms.
There are ways, but it's not as straightforward as it should be.
Turns out the colour on macOS is linked to the system wide Accent colour. To change it, you need to go to System Settings > Appearance and then change the Accent colour.
I've altered the Accent colour to Blue. Also note that this changes the Highlight colour by default. I've set mine to Yellow. It's a universal rule, links are blue, highlighter pens are yellow. That's the way it's supposed to be.
On the mobile OS it's not possible to change the colour completely, but it can be improved with an Accessibility feature. This works the same for both iOS and iPadOS. Settings > Accessibility, scroll to the bottom and select Per-App Settings. Select Add App and search for Notes. You'll want to turn Increase Contrast to On.
For anyone who is interested, I picked out the text and background colours and ran them through the WebAIM Contrast Checker and of course, it fails with a contrast ratio of ~2:1. The fix on iOS does improve this number to ~3:1, but still reports as a failure. Here's hoping this gets better in a future release.
