You’re out surfing in the morning before work and you return to your car, put all your crap away and just want to sit on the beach for an hour getting caught up on work. You bust out your laptop and it’s just a little too bright with the rays of the morning sun not only causing the fan of your computer to kick into high gear but also causing you not to be able to see the screen. Do you get up and leave? Do you sacrifice the sound of the morning waves and the breeze of the ocean air?
Well, the fans are going to run when it’s hot out. But you can do something about that glare. In OS X Mountain Lion, the Invert Colors feature (which I’ve always called Negative Mode) has a disabled keyboard shortcut by default now. We all know this is the coolest feature in the entire OS, so let’s enable it again.
Each time you use it, you could open the Accessibility System Preference pane and check the box for Invert colors. But, it’s crucial Command-Option-Control-8 opens it, because at the end of the day I’m lazy.
To enable the keyboard shortcuts, open the Keyboard System Preference pane and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Then, scroll down to Invert colors and check the box. Viola, more helpful to a trip to the beach than swinging by a Tommy Bahama store the night before!
To enable the shortcuts (aka symbolic hotkeys) via the command line (so I can lazily put this into my imaging workflow at home), see this article.
