10 macOS Tips to Make Your Life Easier

[alexandr]

btw did you add blur with quicktime ? i use pixelmator but it takes me quite a lot of time tbh lol

Nah, I had photoshop open)

 

[bgarnett]

So updating my hot corner that activates the screensaver, the number of times I’ve logged in only to have it activate I’ve lost count. Modifiers are go!!

 

[ElectricPotato]

Apple == Vim.

Not eMacs?

 

[MysteriousStain]

Why do these useful things get put into the OS only for Apple to not make us aware of them?

 

[mihighil]

Thanks for these, more articles like these are always welcome.

 

[jayducharme]

I agree with the general sentiment -- these are more great tips that I never knew existed. I never knew what Stationery Pad was for.

 

[nt5672]

All I want is to be able to lock the bottom dock to my main monitor. I guess the simple stuff is too difficult for Apple.

 

[Macropanda]

99% of articles that offer hidden mac tips are the same old thing over and over. This however, is full of great tips I’ve never seen before. Thanks!

 

[ethanwa79]

Excellent article guys. Thanks for this!!

 

[meson]

Not eMacs?

eMacs is for sissies. Then there’s me. Back when I was doing a lot of work on remote files, I used a gui for sshfs so I could edit remote files in Xcode or TextEdit on my local machine.

eMacs wasn’t completely unbearable, but I could never get the hang of vim.

 

[centauratlas]

It is sort of like Vim. You never really stop learning how to be more efficient. Apple == Vim. Who'd ever had guessed.

I'd have said emacs, but pretty much the same point. 😂. These are useful articles, with hidden features that many people didn't know they needed.

 

[centauratlas]

eMacs is for sissies. Then there’s me. Back when I was doing a lot of work on remote files, I used a gui for sshfs so I could edit remote files in Xcode or TextEdit on my local machine.

eMacs wasn’t completely unbearable, but I could never get the hang of vim.

Now I tend to stick with vi, or run fetch and then BBEdit to edit files remotely and have them auto save back to the remote machine. That might be a good tip for one of these articles although it does require fetch.

I am surprised that several other people mentioned vi, vim, and emacs.

 

[jinnj]

Learned a few new things but I big tip for all. If the App is made by Apple. The Option key will usually uncover secondary features. This is true for dropdowns and the menus. Open Safari, click on a menu, then hold down the Option to see the labels swap.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Thank you for the excellent article, MR.

 

[Michael4Mac]

I need a tip! If I select a lot of PDF files and double-click them, the first few open as separate windows (which is what I want) but some open as tabs in one of the windows. How can I completely disable tabs in Preview? In Monterey I already have Preferences/General/Prefer-Tabs set to never.

 

[mrgraff]

i fail to understand how it can be super useful

would u mind sharing a screenshot of your finder pls ? genuinely curious

Think of it like a mini-dock that you can access while working in a Finder window.

 

[icanhazmac]

Thanks MR! A few new ones in there for me!

 

[grayskyz]

If anyone figures out how to bring up a specific System Setting like General or Passwords via keyboard shortcut let me know

 

[adrianlondon]

i fail to understand how it can be super useful

would u mind sharing a screenshot of your finder pls ? genuinely curious

I've just learnt about this too.

I put the Textedit app up there and dragged a file to it. It opened in Textedit. I think I'll put some other editors up there.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

I've just learnt about this too.

I put the Textedit app up there and dragged a file to it. It opened in Textedit. I think I'll put some other editors up there.

Thanks now that's awesome

 

[loby]

A lot of these are actually new to me and useful! Most of the time these articles cover basic or not so useful “tricks.”

The snapback and stationary pad items in particularly will be useful to me. I hope snapback can deal with the annoying redirect phenomenon where you experience a redirect immediately upon clicking a search result link, and therefore every time you hit back, you go to the previous link which redirects you to the site again.

Basics are good too, but "Yes", when I first saw the 10 tips I thought, "Ok..probably I may get one thing I have not seen or known..."

But for the first time I was like..."What the?!? almost chocked on my tea.

The best article I have seen for awhile..

 

[MacBH928]

The stationary/template shortcut is awesome. Do other OSs have this?

 

[svish]

Really useful tips, especially the one to open a copy of a file.

 

[LeadingHeat]

This article was awesome! Thank you for all the cool tips. I didn’t know a lot of them even existed.

 

[jchap]

2. Access More Preview File Format Options

When you come to save or export a file in Preview, Option-click the Format dropdown to get access to several additional file types.

This is a great tip.

That said, I find it quite frustrating when Apple hides "the rest of the features" with the click+Option key combination. This was inexplicable when they did this with the display color calibration feature (you can't even customize the display calibration settings without the Option+click action, and the UI gives zero indication that the option is even available). I understand why they want to "dumb down" the interface to give users only what they generally need and then "hide" the rest, but not even knowing that the features exist in the first place is poor design.