For me, it was finding that I can use "Stacks" in Finder to clear desktop. For years, I was irritated with screenshots lying all over my desktop screen but didn't have the energy to sort them manually. When I found out Stacks, I was like ...
Smart Folders (Finder -> File -> New Smart Folder). It's not exactly hidden but I never paid too much attention to it. It's essentially a way to create a folder whose content is dynamically updated based on your search conditions.
For example, you can create a smart folder that contains all PDF files matching a certain name pattern within a given directory (or the whole disk) [0]. You can get really advanced, there's a ton of different parameters you can use [1], and you can even create more complicated conditions by holding Option and clicking the plus sign (now changed to just three dots). And of course you can drag these folders into the sidebar's Favourites section.
I’ve been sad since they were introduced that they don’t work at the file system level, hence not in CLI applications. Support for them in desktop apps that open directories is also spotty.
I would LOVE them if they were reimplemented as a fuse style file system instead of a userland macOS trick.
I wonder if there is a list somewhere around Apple of "Annoying Edge Cases We'd Have To Support If Smart Folders Worked At The Filesystem Level", and how long it is.
Like, you're in a smart folder that contains files whose name includes "foo", and you try to create a file whose name does not include "foo", what happens? Do you get an existing filesystem error? Do you get a new "can't create new files in smart folders" error?
Interestingly enough I just discovered that if you drag a file into the Tags section of the Finder window's sidebar, it will remain where it is - but if you create a smart folder whose criteria is "tag:tagname" it won't let you drag anything into it, even though it shows the exact same set of files.
Presumably a "smart directory" would itself be read-only, as if mounted from an ROFS; but its contents would all be symbolic links, such that when you're opening the file, you're opening its readlink(2) target, so the fact that the source link was read-only doesn't matter to your ability to modify the file.
This would pretty much match the expectations of how "Smart Folders" currently work in the Finder, and also how equivalents like "Smart Playlists" work in iTunes/Music.
Ooh, good one. Not a problem when it’s GUI-only, with the little display of the precise path at the bottom when you click it, but disambiguating this for CLI use requires a whole new approach.
That's not the point. I have no doubt that the people at Apple are able to solve these issues. I think a lot of people on HN are able to propose solutions to many of these issues.
The point OP was making is that they have probably did their due diligence and subsequently decided that it ain't worth doing.
Oh for sure. I also imagine it depends on which team proposed it. If it’s the Finder team it might not occur to them to offload it to the file system team because it’s a fancy add on, not a system level thing. I have never used this feature but might give it a go. Having all the PDF files in one place could actually be fairly useful. Could also be nice to combine this with my Dropbox photography workflow.
I think it would be relatively easy to write a MacFUSE driver that uses the mdfind APIs to provide a fake directory of symlinks to the actual files. I might give it a shot. Sounds like a nice side project.
"hence not in CLI applications" is that specific aspect accurate? I'm no longer mac user but thought mdfind (https://ss64.com/osx/mdfind.html) was the command line version of what smart folders use. Not the same as a filesystem but usable for many CLI apps.
I exclusively used smart playlists for my ipod nano (for date reference :), I pray that one day these smart folders appear on win/osx as a low level. Like smart symbolic links. Surely it cant be that hard!
I think so. Just create a new Smart Folder, set the condition to something that matches all files, for example "Created is after 1970" and sort by "Date Created".
Other way around. Smart playlists (iTunes 3; July 17, 2002) came long before smart folders (MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger"; April 29, 2005), and solve a simpler problem due to dealing with a single file type and a pre-existing existing centralized database of standardized and relatively homogeneous ID3 metadata. Spotlight was created to extensibly generalize these capabilities to the while filesystem.
Your default web browser with your default search engine will now open and perform your query.
I can't stress this enough how much I use this workflow when writing code.
Another thing for the OPs issue with the screenshots, (there's a few steps via terminal so maybe try the above shortcut to search for an article on how to do it) you can have all your screenshots redirect to a folder.
For example all of my screenshots end up in $HOME/screenshots
Also, another cool and sometimes useful shortcut, holding option while clicking is a big thing in osx. Try click the wifi icon in the top right corner whilst holding the option key. It will give you a bunch more details :)
Try changing the default in Safari, on the theory that it might use that as some sort of “system search engine”? Failing that, it’s probably just hardcoded.
Definitely uses Safari + Duck Duck Go for me. It appears that it just "types" the string into Safari's search bar, so whatever that does is what it does.
I’ve been using windows more recently since my personal Mac bit the dust and I’m trying to decide if there’s really that much reason to own a personal Mac.
So now I realize for years I’ve been using this silent feature of macs for years called “not totally jacked up font rendering”. I would never have imagined this was a feature, but apparently there is a collective insanity in windowsland where the quality of font rendering is not just a total and utter failure. So this is my new top Mac feature.
Some people, myself included, prefer how Windows render fonts. Others prefer MacOS.
From what I recall the last time this came up on HN, MacOS tries to render true to the font as if in a professional work flow that ends with a physical product. Windows aims for on screen legibility as it's primary goal.
Also remember that most Windows machines have a much lower DPI screen that what comes with or is hooked up to a Mac, so what is being optimized for there is also different.
Honestly hooked up to my large 1440p screen, MacOS's font rendering isn't /that/ nice, it becomes a wash vs Windows, and on a 1080p laptop I'll take Windows don't rendering.
That's a hard pill to swallow when my ability to read anything is so strained by trying to focus letters. I mean if I was just able to read the words better I'd not be complaining, that's what I want to do lol. I'm on 1440p here and microsoft sells devices with higher resolutions so I don't know how much legs this argument has to keep going on. I mean this is what I see in windows system preferences promising to make things less blurry:
So there is subpixel antiiasing, which I prefer, it works really well on lower res displays and gives you more horizontal dpi, but not all app frameworks support it (...) and some people /hate/ it.
Then there is the classic grayscale anti-aliasing.
Finally there is the nightmare of different DPI monitors.
I've also witnessed a machine (Surface Book!) that decided to start rendering all fonts in MS office applications in some weird super jaggy way like it was 1992 or something.
The fonts should never be blurry, IIRC Microsoft tries go snap characters to pixel boundaries, which is less "correct" than Apple but should be more legible.
Something is broken with you pc. What resolution have you set? In Windows you set display resolution to your monitors native resolution. And then in Scale and Layout you set the necessary scaling.
noticed the same when I first boot-camped into windows and my retina MacBooks fonts were Jacked. never noticed how nicely MacOS displays fonts till I was met with the nonsense that is windows high resolution font rendering yuck
I regularly switch between devices, platforms, and monitors. On all platforms, it really depends on the font, the application, and the hardware. For example, Windows has a really hard time if you have multiple monitors with different DPIs. Some macOS applications have trouble with some monitors. macOS itself has trouble with some monitors. It varies widely.
I remember watching a speech from Steve Jobs where he specifically said he learned about calligraphy or typefacing (I don’t remember the specific terms) to implement proper font rendering on macs. This was also before OSX came out.
It was interesting because I realized how subtly difficult font rendering is. Unless you’re using a monospaced font all of the characters have different widths, you have to figure out how to split text into lines, or how much to space text if the alignment is set to justify. In some of the fancier fonts on macOS, the characters actually change slightly if there are other characters nearby.
If I recall, what he was really saying was - when he was in college, he chose to go to some classes that weren't required, but were interesting to him, personally - one of them was on typography. He learned a bunch of non-obvious things about how fonts are designed, and how they use things like serifs for legibility, etc, etc - just this huge swath of things that he didn't necessarily "learn in depth", but he became aware of the existence of, and aware of why anyone ought to care that they exist.
So then a few years later, he's running a computer company, and it's the heyday of greenscreen, monospaced fonts. And a lot of people - without this connection to the font-making culture of western history, genuinely thought that's perfectly fine, no room-for-improvement, etc. Monospaced stuff was honest, straightforward, industrial - it didn't waste any effort on silliness like "looking pretty" (very much like soviet brutalist architecture).
As a manager, he was able to at least greenlight the idea of "wasting money" (lots of it, in fact), on decent typography, because, thanks to that education, he understood it wasn't just being done to make stuff prettier, but was actually being done to make it easier to read. That there was a powerful, utilitarian reason to do fancy fonts, not just an aesthetic one.
I don’t think it was specifically for the Mac. I think this might be from the speech he gave at Stanford where he talked about dropping his required classes and going to ones that he just was interested in. He later applied what he learned though.
There was a whole typesetting industry doing this in the 70's, with a typographic quality still unsurpassed by today's computers: AutoLogic APS-5, Compugraphic, the Pegasus font system running on DataGeneral minis.
My wife spent two years with a Surface Pro running Windows 10, and when it recently croaked we got her a new MacBook Pro. The degree of relief she had is remarkable.
It’s the little stuff like this that is just so frustrating that we can’t do this better on all platform. macOS has similar sets of flaws, it just does it better than the others. I just wish we could have a few years without new above ground features and more cleaning up quality and consistency of UI/UX features. I’d take more of that on any platform.
Honestly, on the high-dpi MacBooks (my 2015 13" rMBP and the 16" MBP), I decided to run 100% rendering (which needs to be done with Retina Display Manager). Chrome on 150% default zoom, and VSCode on zoomed in + shortcut to +/- font size easily. Most other electron based apps (Spotify/Todoist) zooms pretty well too. Pixel alignment with round scaling means much better font rendering. UI elements are a bit too small though. But worth the tradeoff to me.
- Ctrl + Cmd + Shift + 4 will let you take a screenshot of a region of your screen and copy it to the clipboard. It can then be pasted directly into most applications, from email clients to chat clients. No random screenshots sitting around. If you want to capture a whole window, press Space after the initial shortcut, then click the window.
- While a menu is open, hold Option; if you're lucky, you'll get some additional options. This works after right-clicking an item in Finder, for example, or after right-clicking an icon in the Dock.
- Magnet for window management. This is a third-party application, but you'll wonder how you lived without it. If you've used Spectacle, Magnet is similar, but I find Magnet to be a bit more graceful.
- Sidecar and AirPlay. Want a second screen? Got an iPad or Apple TV? You can effortless treat it as a second screen with very low latency. It "just works."
- Cmd + Space to open Spotlight. Most power users are already familiar with this; if you're not, try it.
- Cmd + Shift + G in Finder to go to a folder by path. You can also use it to copy the path to the current folder.
- Return/Enter to rename the currently-selected file in Finder. If you're coming from Windows/Linux and are accustomed to pressing F2, you might not know about this one.
- Similarly, to open the currently selected item in Finder, press Cmd + O. To navigate up a directory, press Cmd + Up.
- Ever installed a new drive in your Mac? You don't need to manually download macOS installation media beforehand; with the right key combination at boot, you can install it via the internet. There are a few different related combinations with differing functionality; it's worth looking them up and choosing the right one for your situation: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255
After you press Ctrl + Cmd + Shift + 4 and start dragging a region, if you hold the space bar, you can move this region around the screen so you're not trapped with where you originally started dragging.
Cmd-Shift-5 for some more nice screenshot options, including disabling that floating window that appears before your screenshot gets saved to the Desktop
⌘-Shift-5 to disable that floating screen shot thing... I love you. That thing is _so slow_ and distracting I always worry my screen shot didn't actually save until that slow window popped up on some random screen.
You can even have it automatically open on an iPad to annotate on– I cannot overstate how useful this is when you're trying to write instructions for something.
If you're using a Macbook with a Touch bar, you can press Cmd + Shift + 4 to enter a screenshot selection mode, and then use Touch bar to adjust screenshot mode (full screen, window or selection) and destination (Desktop, Clipboard, Preview, Documents etc) on the fly.
After pressing Cmd + Shift + 4, press Space and then click on a window or alert to screenshot it entirely, instead of having to drag out a rectangular region. It works at the level of the compositor so the screenshot includes its chrome and translucent drop shadow, and nothing behind or overlapping the window,
ctrl + cmd + shift + 4 was what first came to mind. For the longest time I did cmd + shift + 3 and did the rest manually.
cmd + ctrl + o to open another tab in Finder in the same folder that's current open. In my opinion this should be the default for cmd + t, which opens a new tab but in your home folder.
For the app icons in the top right, clicking while Option is pressed also shows different menus. For example, the wifi icon now has options for diagnostics or the battery icon has a battery quality indicator.
Marking a file as "Stationary Pad" will create and open a copy every time you open the original. Good for templates or any other file you don't want to accidentally save changes to.
I know, right? Been using Macs for 25 years and discovered it a few months ago on accident. Not sure how long it's been there, but definitely a dumb name!
I think it originated with the Lisa. It's mentioned in that context on folklore.org (1):
> Lisa users never dealt with Lisa applications directly (these were called tools in Lisa parlance) but instead always manipulated stationery pads which produced documents.
It's been there for a very long time. I used to teach DTP with QuarkExpress back in 92 and this feature was gold. It helped to preserve and not destroy the page templates of the magazine. The fine folks at this publisher had a hard time adjusting to the new world and it saved me so much time when they messed around with the layout and page settings
Interesting feature, but it seems to work only when opening the file from Finder.
If you open the file from within the application itself (I tested with Pages) or via an external app (Terminal, LaunchBar, etc) then it opens the original.
This has been around for a long time but most people don’t know about it:
Dragging and dropping files from the finder into an file selector window (ie. Open File in most programs) will navigate to that file and select it. As others mentioned this works in terminal as well to give you a path, but actually this generally works in any text box (unless it specifically handles paths being drag ‘n dropped). This also works with multiple files / multi file selection, and in the case of inserting the path as text, they are space delimited and auto quoted (convenient for shell use).
Edit: This icon can include the one at the top of a finder window (the window title). That’s actually interactable and can be dragged and dropped for the directory itself.
> this works in terminal as well to give you a path
I'll add that if you want the path of a file and the destination application doesn't support drag 'n' drop, right click on a file in finder, then hold the Option key and you'll see the copy command changes from "Copy" to "Copy as Pathname".
Oh my god this is so useful! I've known about the 'drag into your terminal' thing for ages but not needing to use the mouse and just doing command-option-c is so much nicer!
And if, for example, a webpage has a button to select files through the open file dialog, you can just drag and drop a file to the button and not go through the open dialog at all.
Didn't realize until this comment, but I use this feature all the time. Open file in a program, then use spotlight to find the file I want, drag it into the open modal.
I use the path version of this all the time for some really long path names :) . I keep those folders open just for that particular purpose. Very handy. It also works for selected text. Works on linux too. I honestly don't know about windows.
Speaking of space delimited, you can also grab a whole directory full of any item and drop into numbers or excel and it will create a list of said files. Tab delimited. Great for inventorying media etc.
The nicest thing is that it auto-escapes the path too so you can safely type a command and then drag any file as an argument without worrying about spaces and shell characters.
Mouse keys -- as an anti-feature. (press option 5 times)
My daughter enabled it while I wasn't at the computer and then thought my keyboard had died. Even took it in to get repaired, and got a new keyboard.
There is no permanent indicator that it's enabled, and it persists after reboots (once logged in)... when I figured out my brand new keyboard still had several broken keys I started looking for S/W level issues. Hard facepalm. It didn't help diagnosis that I did have some physically affected keys too.
Three-finger drag is the one thing I just can't live without.[0]
Finder: Cmd+Shift+G to navigate wherever I want (with autocomplete)
Text input: Control+Command+Space for the emoji list and search
Text input (switching keyboards for Japanese input): Control+Space for quick toggles
Text input (accents in my native language): all the accents and letters of various European languages are usually made by using Option+[key] for the accent, and Option+[key]+letter for the proper letter. The [key] maps are e -> ´, `` -> `` (I'm messing up the rendering of the quotes here despite my best efforts), i -> ˆ, u -> ¨ and some keys Option+[key] directly give a character when it's unique, such as Option+a=å and Option+o=ø, and Option+1=¡ (because it's the key for ! otherwise, which makes sense - and can help with Spanish)
For the longer examples, Option+e+e = é, Option+e+a = á, Option+`+a = à, Option+u+u = ü, Option+i+u = û, Option+n+n = ñ, etc.
Holding Option in menus also shows extra options and their shortcuts (although this is less and less the case outside of the Apple apps themselves). An example using Finder -> Edit and pressing/releasing the Option key[1]
Oh and one more: the app "Stickies", which allows you to have "post-it notes" with color coding and collapsing the note by double-clicking on the title, saving to file, etc. I use it to take quick notes or set casual reminders.
Last but not least, not an Apple app but a very helpful tool I've used to make the gif in this post: Kap is incredibly convenient to records bits of the screen and save to various formats, and it's been improving a lot since its early releases[2] (I have no stake in this, I'm just thankful for such a cool piece of free software)
Nowadays, holding down a key will show a pop-up with all the accent options, which you can then select by mouse or by typing the number under it, much like on iOS. The option route is my preferred one, as it's faster, but the new one is much more accessible to people without keyboard prowess.
Is there a way to shut off the long press functionality? Sometimes I just want to type “byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”, and I have already made the effort to learn accent key combos.
I agree. It's great to see that there are different paths a user can take towards being satisfied.
If I remember correctly, once you hold the key you can also use the number underneath to select the character (as in "long press e, press 2"). I've since disabled that long-hold thing because this allows me faster text repetition (eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... in all its glorious uselessness), but I am glad Apple thought about the UX for different types of users there.
Three finger drag is nice, but I wish it worked on any part of the window not just the title bar. Also, there should be a warning that enabling 3 finger drag automatically increases the "Mission Control" gesture from 3 fingers to 4 fingers (swiping up).
Thank you so much for telling us about it, but I expected that I can drag the window anywhere. Turns out I can only drag it where it could also be dragged by clicking normally.
But I turned it on anyway, we'll see if I'll use it.
It also works to do text selection without clicking+dragging, same with moving files or folders. I've mostly stopped clicking outside of browsers thanks to the 3-finger drag option.
The great thing about three-finger drag is when you reach the end of the trackpad, you can lift one finger and put another finger to continue the drag. Tap and drag on Windows couldn't do that.
I think you can actually lift two fingers as soon as you've started the 3-finger drag and it'll continue dragging. If you're quick enough you can lift all three fingers and reposition them, too. They really put in a lot of work into the software behind the trackpad, which is still a major selling point for macbooks in my opinion.
interesting, I've been using quicktime's native screen recording feature. Converting from mov to gif would probably take another tool though, probably ffmpeg
That’s wild. I’ll leave it off, though. I don’t trust Finder to handle file operations safely and effectively (too many dangling files, partial copies, and littered indexing files in my history).
If I have dot files, I’m gonna go all grey beard and handle them in a terminal.
I’ve been using `defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall dock` for at least 15 years. A quick DDG search, indicated this shortcut arrived in High Sierra. Has it been around longer?
It has been around for as long as I can remember, and I have been using Mac since 10.3.
—
Edit: Thinking about it a bit more, it might not be that long since I wasn’t into programming back then and hidden files meant little to me. The first time I used it was probably around Leopard.
—
Edit 2: It seems like the feature debuted in Lion (10.7). This would make sense since Finder was overhauled in that version to add several features.
Why do you do clean installs? I've been moving the same MacOS image since 2006. Four machines, without any issues using whatever MacOS provides at the time.
Do you have a good way of discovering these keys / syncing them with the UI? I like to do the same thing but sometimes change a setting in the UI and don’t know what to update in my script without diffing the entire prefs directory before and after the change.
are you mathiasbynens? If so, thank you. I've been using that script as a reference for my own clean install script. Not sure where else I could have found the information, seems like Apple themselves are against documenting it and have in fact deprecated some of the settings in later macOS versions.
my favourite feature is how the title bar icon in any app that’s editing a file (textmate/ word etc) is a pointer to the actual file unlike windows.
- you can drag that file anywhere to move it.
- CMD click it to see a breadcrumb menu showing where it is and navigate to the folder
on a similar vein, dragging a file into an open file modal box makes it browse to the containing folder. In windows, dragging a file would move the file into that folder.
I combine the above two quite a bit. Editing a file in app A, need to upload it somewhere via browser. Drag file from title bar into open dialog box, done.
> my favourite feature is how the title bar icon in any app that’s editing a file (textmate/ word etc) is a pointer to the actual file unlike windows.
This behaviour seems to come 'for free', so, when it breaks, I can only assume that it's intentionally broken. One of the many ways that Adobe Acrobat violates the design language on macOS is by making this somehow not work. (They also break print to PDF–I guess because otherwise you wouldn't pay for the PDF creation capabilities—and do their absolute best to make sure you don't access the native print settings, which is fun because Adobe's own print settings don't play well with the printer accounting software at $WORK).
Demos of all the drag and drop behavior can be seen in the Aqua keynote. Lots of people don’t know how powerful it is on macOS even though it was THE big feature at launch.
>- CMD click it to see a breadcrumb menu showing where it is and navigate to the folder
Similarly you can right click the window title (click with two fingers on the touchpad) for this functionality. It's very useful to navigating up in the folder hierarchy in Finder without adding any new icons to the toolbar.
It appears almost instantly when you mouse over where it used to be. I've been living on it for the past few weeks and haven't changed my muscle memory at all.
The icon in the window title bar is often referred to as the proxy icon. I thought this was Apple's official name for it, but I can't find any evidence to support that in Apple's documentation.
> my favourite feature is how the title bar icon in any app that’s editing a file (textmate/ word etc) is a pointer to the actual file unlike windows. you can drag that file anywhere to move it.
I knew about this feature but it took me about a year or two of using macOS every day and the feature only working about 50% of the time before I understood how to get it to work reliably.
For those, like me, who were having problems: You have to click and hold the mouse button over the window, then hold the mouse there for a short period of time (e.g. half a second), then drag. If you drag too quickly it'll move the window instead.
Cmd-R (R for "reveal") in the open/save file dialog opens the present directory in Finder. This is useful as I commonly want to do some additional janitory tasks in the directory.
A complimentary feature: when you want to “open” a file from some file open dialog box, instead of navigating through the dialog, go find the file some other way and drag-n-drop it onto the dialog. The file won’t open, BUT it’ll pop over to the directory and select the file for you to then open in the context of the application.
I use this all the time when I either have something handy in Finder or can find it more quickly with alfred.
While this isn't a generic feature, I want to say that everyone should try embracing the non-keyboard nature of macOS (as it always has been done), not just complaining that some of the elements are not reachable in the keyboard.[0] Try using the mouse, trackpad (which is top-quality), and the Touch Bar (which I guess will be the most controversial?).
Especially drag-n-drop. I'm not sure if it's already mentioned, but the proxy icon (the icon in the title bar) is super-useful in situations when you need to find (e.g. upload/attach the file in Safari, opening the file with another app) the file somewhere else. Just drag the proxy icon and drop it to the destination, and it usually will do what you want.
Also the Touch Bar. Everybody complains about it while not even trying to take advantage of it...[1] Customize your Touch Bar so that the buttons are in a consistent way, e.g. I always put the new tab button (if it exists) in the far right, where I can reach without looking, and I put the most useful actions (like getting information, trashing files in Finder, tab switching in Safari, text suggestion, etc...) in the middle, and put the less-useful but somewhat frequent actions (like toggling the sidebar, emojis, etc..) in the left. If you consciously try using them for a week or two, you realize you're much productive using the Touch Bar than using obscure shortcuts or moving the mouse.
[0]: BTW, good news for people who were complaining - macOS Big Sur greatly increases the amount of controls reachable with the keyboard, although I dislike the fact that I have to bang more tabs to reach some button.
[1]: There's definitely Apple's fault here too, if you're using a Touch Bar equipped Mac, 'brew cask install haptickey' so that you get haptic feedback on your Touch Bar touches.
I know what they meant here. The touch bar seems like a keyboard but it's not, because of the sliders and customization.
My original touch bar layout mirrored the pre-touch bar layout out of familiarity. Recently I've learned how to use it as intended (sliders instead of up and down buttons, using application-custom buttons). I realized that I was just being an old man about the touch bar before.
I think one of the key advantages of a non-keyboard interaction is that you don't have to look at the pointing device to see what you're doing. Touch-bar precisely needs that, especially given that there is no tactile feedback. And it's the main reason why I think the Touch-bar destroys productivity.
I’m curious, what do you use F-keys for? I’ve moved to a mech keyboard with no F-keys, as I've never had much use for them. I do have a few choice custom shortcuts, using Command-Option-based shortcuts.
Coding mostly. I know by heart most of IntelliJ shortcuts. Things like find usages, type safe move and copy of code, rename of entities, etc. are F-key bound by default. I don’t customize because customization of defaults makes it harder to work on other people’s computers.
With the pandemic is kind of a non issue, but at the office it’s quite common.
I agree about the usefulness of doing mouse/keyboard combination manoeuvres, as an advanced user. Saves time for sure, and keeps you in the flow to keep up more with your brain speed.
An excellent example I discovered only the other day: in Finder, press spacebar to speed up drag-and-drop spring-loading. (It finally makes spring-loading USEFUL!)
Batch renaming files in Finder.[1] It's quite useful and one of the few GUI-based looping operations that takes me less time than fat-fingering the shell incantation.
What in the world, that's been here the entire time? I've been looking up how to do it in bash every time I've needed to do it. It's so strange how macOS has this appearance of simplicity but just below the surface you have stuff like this
No, it was added in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Before that you needed to either use Terminal or "A Better Finder Rename" which still offers more options than Finder, including the use of metadata to rename your files.
I recently discovered some nice helpers to resize windows:
- Hold down the option key while resizing a windows (with the mouse) to also resize the opposite side. This also works when resizing the window on a corner to resize all edges at once.
- Double click a window border to enlarge this side of the window up to the edge of the scereen. Hold down the option key to enlarge also the opposite site.
- Double-click the title bar of a window to maximize it
You can assign a folder full of images to the background of Terminal.app, and it will choose background images at random, so a folder full of dark solid colors gives you random dark backgrounds, enabling you to tell your terminal windows apart easily.
In fairness, it's barely supported in Terminal.app --- in that I had to make a bunch of solid-colored images to make it work! It should be a first-class feature of all terminal applications. I had no idea how much I want this feature day-to-day until I got fed up with a 27" monitor display crammed with overlapping identical-looking tcpdump windows a few weeks ago.
Wait until you find out you can change which directory screenshots save to. I have a dedicated "screenshots" directory in my home directory. And then a stack in the Dock for it similar to the one for the Downloads folder.
Any idea if there is a way to remove the preview that shows up in the bottom right corner? OSX doesn't write the screenshot until after that disappears which is annoying
While recording your screen, you can also record your microphone by choosing it in the Options menu. However, there is no way to record audio that is output to your speakers unless you first create a custom audio source using Soundflower (https://github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower) or Loopback (https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/).
The preview thing is really handy as you can directly drag and drop it into a document or chat window or whatever.
After you’ve done that it won’t be saved, which is great as you can quickly snap and use a screenshot without having to switch to the Finder - and the desktop doesn’t get cluttered with hundreds of images.
A huge problem with this is that some apps don't "accept" this drag and drop, and the preview just disappears without saving the screenshot file. I can't remember the exact apps which behave that way, but I've been burned and irritated multiple times because of this. As a result, I disabled the preview feature and added the screenshot folder to the dock just like OP did.
Even better, you can just have those screenshots save to only your clipboard. Just add ctrl to your combo, _or_ you can remap it in Keyboard under System Preferences.
Wait until you find out you don't even have to save screenshots (most of the time) and can copy them straight to clipboard, and Cmd-V them where you need them. Cmd-Ctrl-Shift-3/4.
Yeah this is what I do 98% of the time. I'm usually not taking a bunch of screen shots. Just 1 or 2, usually because copy/paste from slack is such a PITA
Three-finger dragging on laptops with touchpads: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204609 It says it's for dragging windows, but it works for all dragging, including files in Finder etc. Couldn't do without it now.
Increase Contrast, which I prefer not just for aesthetic reasons (it gives a slightly old-school feel to the interface), but because it delineates areas of windows / apps more clearly: Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Increase Contrast. This will automatically turn on Reduce Transparency, but I used that setting anyway, to reduce distracting detail.
You can also get this behavior with “double tap to grab”, which allows you to pick up your finger and put it back down repeatedly as you are dragging something around. Same idea, different (turned-off by default) gesture.
Command-Shift-? is the better version of this imho, directly opens the help menu and you can just type the name of the menu item and hit enter. Way quicker than navigating to it.
Yep this is what I came to say - OSX's help menu automatically searches all menu commands and if you hover over them it will open up the menu, show you the location, and if you hit enter just use it for you.
This is also something you can generally call from Applescript as well, if you want to automate application behaviors.
Mind sharing an example AppleScript of that? Every time I’ve dug in there, it’s never had quite what I wanted. But this seems like an especially leverage-able idea.
It's been about 10 years since I touched that code, so apologies if these are all things you know.
I am pretty sure most of the work was just extending the documentation in https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La... with looking up application "dictionaries" (iirc, a box of supported commands) and all menu items being accessible by default.
Thanks so much, it has been a constant annoyance for me that _sometimes_ Ctrl+F2 just doesn't do anything. It did not occur to me to check if that's a known issue, I just wrote it off as a glitch in the matrix. Your workaround is going to make my daily menu usage go much more smoothly, thanks!
note that ctrl-F1 by default toggles keyboard access, which breaks (some of) the other ctrl-Fn bindings (which i just found out by testing this). you can disable this in keyboard shortcuts of course.
I have long used Shift-Command-4 to take screenshots, but I only recently discovered Shift-Command-5, which provides finer control (and it's much easier to use when I'm working at my treadmill desk).
Also, Command-K to clear out a terminal window (also often works in similar places, such as the MAMP error log viewer).
The various screenshot features are good, and also one of the best uses of the touchbar I've seen. Use any of the variations on taking a screenshot, and you will get a menu to take a screenshot of an area, window, full desktop, etc.
> This default controls the numeric argument binding. The default is for numeric arguments not to be supported. If you provide a binding for this default you enable the feature. This allows you to repeat a keyboard command a given number of times. For instance “Control-U 10 Control-F” means move forward ten characters.
There are also easily memorable keyboard shortcuts for common accents in languages that use roman script. E.g. Opt+e followed by any character places an acute accent on that character. Opt+u adds an umlaut, etc. etc.
I've switched that off many years ago so I forgot that's even a thing. In my opinion the best way is to get hold of those characters with the option key. So if you need ñ you can just type option-n + n, or option-o for ø.
One can be forgiven for finding this after long years of useage, because it didn't used to be the case. I'm not sure when it was introduced, but it was in a (to this oldster) recent version.
I found these after years, although it's been years since I found it. Preview is pretty good for merging PDFs, deleting pages from PDFs, and adding annotations. Whenever I have to do these things on a windows machine, I struggle to find software to do it. Most importantly, preview can add your signature via trackpad, or by holding up your signature to a webcam.
I have seen pdf files swell to ~ ten times the original size when I edit them with Preview. Apparently, Preview will reencode images upon saving, often choosing a less efficient encoding than original. The most extreme cases I encountered would be files scanned in black and white, with Fax or JBIG2 encoding. Since I use such files a lot, I use pdfpen instead for all my pdf editing tasks.
I've only ever seen that happen when re-exporting using Quartz filters, where the whole point is to re-encode, and saving an e.g. 300-page PDF will take several minutes, with a progress bar.
If you're just using Preview to rearrange/combine/etc. pages, no re-encoding happens and file size stays the same.
Believe me, I do a lot of PDF management in Preview. Even to the point of creating my own Quartz filters in the ColorSync Utility precisely so that I can intentionally re-encode images when I want to. (Because the Apple-provided Quartz filters are hard-coded to abusrdly high or absurdly low resoltions.)
It’s been years since I stopped using Preview for PDF files, generally using Skim for reading and pdfpen for editing them. Perhaps something changed since then? That is good news, if so.
I should have tried it before replying, but did not have easy access to my laptop. Now I redid the experiment. Starting with a 24 page scanned pdf, I deleted the first page using Preview, then saved and closed the file. It swelled from 2 MB to 6.7 MB. Looking into the file, I see that all the images in the original are encoded with CCITTFaxDecode, while the images in the edited file are encoded using FlateDecode. I cannot see anything relevant to the issue in the preferences.
Does an app have shortcut you don't like? Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts and click the plus. As prompted, enter the exact title of menu action you want trigger and the new shortcut. I use the on all my machines to rebind Quit Safari / Chrome / Firefox /Mail to Cmd + Option + Q to avoid killing the application when I fat-finger Cmd + Q instead of Cmd + W.
Others already mentioned:
- three-finger drag is indispensable. Anytime I touch someone else's laptop I turn it on and blow their minds
- hold Cmd in Spotlight to reavel the path containing the selected item, Cmd + Enter opens that folder in Finder.
- readline keys work in basically every text input on the machine. Want to delete a line? C-a C-k. Delete the word preceding the cursor? M-Backspace.
- Cmd + Down opens the selected item in finder, Cmd + Up jumps one level up the folder hierarchy Cmd + Left/Right expand/collapse
Worth noting: Chrome actually no longer dies when you fat-finger cmd-w. It shows a "hold cmd-q to quit" overlay and only dies if you keep holding the keys down.
For example, you can create a smart folder that contains all PDF files matching a certain name pattern within a given directory (or the whole disk) [0]. You can get really advanced, there's a ton of different parameters you can use [1], and you can even create more complicated conditions by holding Option and clicking the plus sign (now changed to just three dots). And of course you can drag these folders into the sidebar's Favourites section.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/lD2zaSd.png
[1] https://i.imgur.com/SKsQRnQ.png