Proteus Hints
Proteus offers a large number of features, including a certain number that do not have a direct manifestation in the user interface. This help page is dedicated to uncovering some of those Proteus hints that may make your life a lot easier!
Displaying your currently playing iTunes song in your status message
Proteus lets you put 3 special tokens in any status message that will get substituted for certain iTunes information. Once you've put any of these tokens in a status message, Proteus will automatically update it as you change, play and pause songs in iTunes!
%itunes will be replaced by the currently playing song's artist followed by the song's title.
%itunes_song will be replaced by the currently playing song's title.
%itunes_artist will be replaced by the currently playing song's artist.
Inserting your status message in your display name
Certain services, in particular MSN, do not support status messages per se. In the case of MSN, the solution that is typically used is displaying the status message as part of the display name. Proteus has a special display name keyword that lets you insert your status message in your display name and have it update automatically when you change your status.
%status_message will be replaced by the current status message.
In addition, you may want to enclose your status message inside some bounding characters, for instance in between parentheses. However, you may not want to display those characters when your status message is empty, as is the case with the default Online status. To that end, Proteus offers two special display name tokens that can be used to bound the portion of your display name that should be hidden when the status message is empty.
%status_start marks the beginning of the status message segment.
%status_end marks the end of the status message segment.
Example: John Doe %status_start(%status_message)%status_end. This will yield John Doe if the current status message is empty, and John Doe (Hello!) if the current status message is Hello!
Status shortcuts
Proteus offers a number of useful shortcuts for manipulating your statuses.
Press Command-Option-S to bring the Create New Status panel, which lets you create a new permanent or temporary status on the fly.
Press Command-# where # is a number from 1 to 9 to switch to the status at the index #
While holding down the Option key, select a status in the status pop-up of the contact list. Proteus will then display a sheet letting you edit the status message of the selected status before setting it as your current status
Switching conversation
Switching between conversations in Proteus can be done with both the keyboard and with the mouse.
Switching conversations with the mouse is as simple as clicking the conversation you wish to see.
Press Command-[ to switch to the previous conversation in the drawer
Press Command-] to switch to the next conversation in the drawer
You can change these shortcuts using Mac OS X's Keyboard Shortcuts feature.