Settings, shortcuts and making Rally yours

There is a moment with every tool you use for long enough. The hammer stops being a hammer and becomes your hammer. You know where it balances. You stop looking at it. The old computer manuals understood this, which is why so many of them ended with an appendix of key commands printed on a card you could tear out and prop against the monitor. By that point in the book you had stopped learning what the program did and started wanting it to do it faster.

You have reached that point with Rally. You can start a Channel, branch a Breakout, hand work to the agent, connect your tools and leave a Sidekick running overnight. This chapter is about the last stretch: making Rally look and behave the way you like, and getting it to answer to your fingers instead of your mouse.

Where settings live, and how to find them#

Some settings are about you, and some are about this Mac. Your name, your avatar colour and your time zone belong to your account. Set them once and they follow you to every computer you sign in on. Light or dark, the menu bar icon, starting at login, the app icon in the Dock and how fast updates arrive belong to the Mac in front of you. The Settings window keeps these apart: the personal and Organization sections sit under one heading, and the app itself sits under Desktop app → Application. When a change does not seem to have reached your other computer, this is usually why.

You do not need to know where a setting lives. Settings has its own search box, and it knows the everyday words people type. Type "theme", "colour" or "startup" and it finds the right switch, even when the switch is labelled something else. If you remember nothing else from this chapter, remember ⌘ , and then type what you are looking for.

What is ahead#

The chapter starts with a tour of the Settings window and your profile, then covers the look of the app, from light and dark to a Dock icon called Ludicrous speed. After that come the habits Rally has as a Mac app (the menu bar, starting at login, why closing the window does not quit it) and how it keeps itself up to date without asking you to download anything.

Then comes the card you could tear out: every keyboard shortcut Rally knows, in tables, grouped by where your cursor is when you press them.

The last page is for people who read the appendix first. It is a roundup of hidden corners: small tricks spread across the whole app, each with a pointer to the page that explains it properly. Nothing on it is essential. All of it saves a few seconds, and a few seconds a few hundred times a week is how a tool becomes yours.