Safari RSS Tip

I’m into coding in certain instances. One of which is learning about how my Mac works and making modifications to it. So, this tip is really from an Apple developer’s blog that goes through all the gyrations on how he figured it out…I’ll spare you that.

The situation is this. If you use Safari’s built-in RSS reader, you’re familiar with the interface: Left column/story headlines and copy, Right column/UI options like story length and a search field.

What’s annoying about this RSS display is that when you click into it, the keyboard focus goes to the search field. That means you can’t simply load the RSS feed in Safari and hit the space bar to scroll the page down. If you hit the space bar, you’re actually in the search field.

So, to remove this annoying behavior, all you have to do is comment out one line of code. You can use BBEdit or TextEdit if you like. It’s on line 139 and it looks like this:

Just add “//” where I did without the quotes before the line and the search field won’t gain focus, you can scroll down using the spacebar, and everyone’s happy. Don’t be surprised when you go to save because you’re editing a system file that requires root access, so get your root password handy and save away.