macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
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saurabhs.org
I use https://rectangleapp.com/ on Mac and it's great. I mostly use shortcuts Left Half and Right Half, and also Maximize (Not the fullscreen mode thank God)
Might as well recommend enabling moving windows around with by clicking anywhere on the window with a keybind just like in most Linux desktop environments https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/321918/move-window...
I use (basically) left, middle, right, and top half/bottom half.
I'm happy to pay for software anyway, but after spending $4000 on a computer I expected such basic desktop manager features, which have been common since the 90s, to come with the package. This is not something extensions are supposed to do. This kind of crap is why I ditched GNOME.
I don't have that, and I can't remember having done anything to stop it.
I've tried some clones for mac os, but they all missed some important (at least to me) functions. Like typing not going to the command line editor, or not having a command line at all.
So it's midnight commander from macports for most complex file operations for me.
I miss Finder's tree view in Explorer so much.
Explorer has its thumbnail processor on the same thread as the UI so if you have a lot of pictures in a directory it'll just hang indefinitely. Sometimes if you have too many files it won't display any at all.
If explorer crashes, it's the same process as your desktop and taskbar, so that disappears too.
The things I miss the most when I accidentically open a Finder window: Cut files wit CMD+X to move them (never understood this when coming from Windows), cycle the files in a folder (start on top if you reach bottom and vice versa) and the comprehensive info bar on the right for files and folders. Give it a try :)
(Command-X is nice, even for a long time Mac user)
A workaround for this (especially if you have a terminal always open) is to drag the file/folder you want to operate on into an open terminal window, which will paste in its path.
(There is a system setting to always show this in the title bar without hovering, which was the old default behavior before Big Sur if I recall correctly. I’m a bit annoyed that it’s now hidden away by default.)
Right-click on directory > Services > New Terminal at Folder.
> viewing or copying a files path
Right-click on directory or file and press Option > Copy "<filename>" as path name.
> navigating a deep file system
Not sure what you mean.
> column width in the column view
Option + click & Drag. Or do you want them to adjust to files/folders name length?
> searching for files
What's wrong with Command + F?
> finding file info
Do you want more than what is shown by Command + I or in the "details" column?
Note that you can also bind a hotkey to this! And in general in macOS, you can a bind to a hotkey to any menu item in any application.
Search "keyboard shortcuts" in settings, then under Services -> Files and Folders.
cdf: aliased to cd "$(pfd)"
Doesn't really open a new Terminal, but usually, that's not what I want to happen anyway.
Erm, what ?
I use Mac, Windows, Linux and BSD daily.
Of all four, searching for files on a Mac is a dream.
Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.
And don't get me started on the inconvenience of searching for files on Linux or BSD, I mean, for starters you have to download a non-default tool like `fd` if you want to search at any reasonable speed.
I was going to say Everything was awesome as a file searcher except for its non-easily searchable name.
But when I checked in a raw Edge instance it was in fact the first result. Ho hum.
It's produced by Voidtools in case YMMV: https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/
Things got much better when I moved from Spotlight to Raycast.
I certainly agree on that, and I also find it more convenient than the desktop search options I’ve tried on Linux (there I usually drop to the command line to search).
But despite really wanting to like Spotlight, e.g. its integration with Apple Mail with email previews is great, I find it unusable for heavy work. I’ve tried customizing it to disable lots of search backends that I don’t need, but still for reasons I don’t understand, it sometimes takes 5+ seconds to process my search results before showing anything, and even the average search often takes a second and is not well-sorted.
In comparison, Alfred is always instant at searching on my computer, and I really prefer how you can explicitly tell it what you are searching for (e.g. `'filename`, `in file contents`, `=math`, etc.) whereas Spotlight tries to guess this and often guesses wrong. It’s also easier to customize if you want to integrate e.g. specific web searches in it.
I’ve tried Raycast since lots of people praise it, but I still find Alfred to have a nicer and more responsive interface, but perhaps it’s just what I’m used to.
I haven't come across issues with ordering, but my use cases are usually pretty simple, so that might be down to a difference in our workflows.
Searching on my SMB network share doesn't work. At all. It's not just that Spotlight won't index it. It's that you can't even search by filename within the current folder you're viewing.
- Does not snap files to a grid by default on icon view, leaving some folders looking like a mess
- Not possible to figure out what's the exact path of the open folder - I just want a full path in the header/title bar. Or let me copy the full path without having to open "get info"
The sorting by name criticism is a weird one to me though. You want it to not sort by name when you tell it to sort by name, and instead sort by file vs folder and then within those two groups sort by name?
For sorting I want it to sort like File Explorer or Dophin. So folders on top (sorted by name), then files (sorted by name). It works if I change Settings > Advanced > Keep folders on top.
Apart from the Path bar in the bottom, there is also an old school title bar method:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool true
killall Finder
It doesn’t work for great for tabs, though, because tabs are short and paths are long.
> Or let me copy the full path …
There are some alternative fun and old methods:
* If you're hovering over the title bar of a finder window there is a little folder icon, the so-called proxy icon which gives access to the current folder. One can drag and drop it and it moves the folder. Dragging a folder or the proxy icon on the Dock icon of Terminal or iTerm opens a new window with the working directory directly set to the folder. But dragged into a text field you're getting the text path. Right click gives you a dropdown for navigation in the current folders path.
The proxy icon was stable in Finder until recently, now you need to hover. But you can re-activate the permanent display of the proxy icon under System Settings → Accessibility → Display, I think.
* MacOS has, since the Next days, the concept of Services. Services are little actions which the System and (good) Apps can provide to do something with with something. Services are found in the context menu or the App menu. If you're right clicking on a folder (sadly not the proxy icon), there are Service Actions by Terminal and iTerm for opening a window or tab for a selected folder.
* AppleScript:
tell application "Finder"
if exists window 1 then
set currentDir to POSIX path of ((target of front Finder window) as text)
else
set currentDir to POSIX path of (path to desktop folder)
end if
set the clipboard to currentDir
end tell
But you can use AppleScript everywhere in MacOS. The Script-Menu, as an own App, as an Automator action or a Shortcut, you can give those hotkeys, possible use them in Alfred or Raycast, etc.
Apart from the syntax it will be a sad day, if Apple retires the AppleScript architecture.
The modern equivalent is "Run Shell Script" in Shortcuts or maybe Automator. Shortcuts has the advantage that you can use your shortcut directly in Quick Actions in Finder's context menu.
I played around a minute and created this but I'm not a Shortcuts expert.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5898ff4c3f2e49ff8ec6bff4013...
One insane caveat: For this to work you'll need to grant Finder Full Disc Access in System Settings → Security. Yes, it sounds insane. It is. But it works.
I’d support this being an option in the View menu or View Options palette, but I think I would lose my mind if this behavior were made default with no way to turn it off.
I can use it as an orthodox file manager (with the f keys I remember from Norton Commander). I also like using it to access remote filesystems over nfs and sftp, and also S3 buckets. It also works well with Dropbox and iCloud. There is a great sync feature to keep source and target directories synchronised. It's also good for diffing directories at a glance. It's good at managing archive files too. Plus the regex file rename feature is often handy for me - I have a few presets saved for various purposes. It's also my go-to MacOS uninstaller, as it gathers the related files.
This combination has served me well for many years.
Nonsense default behavior, slow as heck, search barely works, keybindings are totally illogical.
It's totally unacceptable.
In fact, nearly all the complaints I see in this and similar threads come down to people expecting macOS to behave like their previous OS did, and being surprised that it doesn't.
OS-X is surprising because there is a lot of marketing pretending that it is the most ergonomic when it is in fact the worst, and mostly it does not really improve other time.
That's very subjective. As a near 40-year user of Mac's, the consistency is quite remarkable. Mac OS 9 -> X was the biggest change, and even that was pretty consistent given just how different it actually was. After using Linux on and off for the last 20 or so years, I still prefer macOS when it comes to the crunch. It's not perfect, but to me at least, the best of a bad bunch.
Here's the thing; GNOME and KDE copied some bits from Mac OS, some bits from CDE/Motif, and a whole lot from Windows. The reason is obvious - familiarity and that IBM AT was largely the hardware people were installing these desktops on to. The "grandma test" (i.e. I taught my Gradma/Mum to use ${desktop}) is pointless. Instead, observe young children who have never seen a desktop computer interact with them. None of them fair well. IOS and to a very slight lesser degree, Adroid fair much better. All anecdotal, but do try it out - opens you're eye to just how bad the desktop is.
Real men prefer IRIX...
currently have a weird situation where a bunch of folders are arranged horizontally and go beyond the right border of the window. but there is no horizontal scroll bar indicating that.
the windows xp/nt/2000 file explorer is the pinnacle of file exploring experience. basically every linux file explorer just more or less copied it - for good reason. but no - apple has to reinvent the wheel and came up with a messed up hexagon.
Could you elaborate on that?
It doesn't happen here with any of the app currently in use: Chrome, Finder, Terminal, Outlook, or Teams.
local hyper = {"ctrl", "alt", "cmd"}
hs.loadSpoon("MiroWindowsManager")
hs.window.animationDuration = 0.3
spoon.MiroWindowsManager:bindHotkeys({
up = {hyper, "up"},
right = {hyper, "right"},
down = {hyper, "down"},
left = {hyper, "left"},
fullscreen = {hyper, "f"}
})Do you mean Cmd + Tab? Because this doesn't happen for me at all. When I click on a window, just that window is focused, but if I Alt + Tab to an app all those windows come to the front, which I find annoying too.
Apple pretend to do ergonomic but their window manager is full of frustration. Using cinnamon is a breeze with everything working well as expected. Even having multi-screens and having apps in menu on the correct screen where they are located.
I usually have open multiple Firefox, console, folder, pdf windows and my life under os-x was a nightmare.
Impossible to have one bottom icon per window (I tried everything, even U-bar that was my hope is just garbage), to not have all windows of the same app open when you click on the icon like Firefox, having to do right click on the icon all the time to go from one window of console to the other, terminals having tabs and window mixed in the menu bar,...
My tips:
- Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > <cmd>), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workflows' to make frequent tasks extremely streamlined (I use one to open LLM prompts in five LLMs, so I press command + space 'llm <prompt>' and 5 browser tabs open with the same prompt in grok, claude, chatgpt, perplexity, and (local) deepseek.
- Itsycal: an 'install and forget' calendar for your menu bar (it also uses vim keybindings to move around the calendar which is a fun yet practical easter egg)
- There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
- Vivid for double the screen brightness
It’s very much changed how I work/use my computer. More than Rectangle did, more than LLMs have.
(I still adore hookshot/rectangle though :)
I also think Aerospace was positioned as “macOS native features only” which helped sell me on it. Aka no hacks or workarounds
I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.
It's basically Alfred with more (?) functionality. Which is basically Spotlight with more functionality. Which is basically a tool to "do stuff" from anywhere on the device.
I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.
I installed some software for key remapping and window tiling (karabiner and rectangle) when I couldn't figure out how to do it natively. You seem like you know what you're talking about; do you happen to have native recommendations?
hidutil property --set '
{
"UserKeyMapping": [
{
"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc": 0x7000000E4,
"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst": 0xFF00000003
}
]
}
'
For window tiling, can't say I've ever looked into it.
Spotlight search would bring up a wikipedia entry for app store instead of the app store on my laptop: https://imgur.com/QV1w7Kq
Typing 'finder' and hitting enter (e.g. to browse for a file), would open finder settings, rather than finder itself.
I haven't used it in ~1 year, those are a couple of examples I can recall.
Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?
1. I can deselect some pre-defined categories that Spotlight searches
2. I can click the "Spotlight Privacy..." button (at the very bottom right). Then I can add folders for it to ignore.
(My preference is for Spotlight to ignore almost everything, so that it isn't indexing stuff and eating CPU on this old Macbook Air. I only have it scan Applications, Calculator, and System Settings. I have it specifically ignore my entire home directory which is where all my git repos are.)
Something happened in 15.1 onwards for me where Spotlight has become way faster and way better. But yes, Alfred used to dominate in search and speed as well.
I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?
I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.
Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.
I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bluesky-514d#financi...
I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this
So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.
Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?
As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.
And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.
Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.
So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.
I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).
I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.
I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.
Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.
To quickly find text, select some text and press ⌘E followed by ⌘G.
In save dialogs, press ⌘= to switch between the compact and expanded layout.
In save dialogs, press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
Hold Option while opening the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth menus to access extra options.
After copying a file, press ⌥⌘V to move the file instead of pasting a copy of it.
Terminal:
Press ⇧⌘A to select the output from the previous command.
Press ⌘L to clear the output from the previous command.
Press ⌃⌘V to paste and format text that is properly escaped for the shell.
Press ⌃T while a command is executing to view runtime statistics about the execution so far.
This one is very cool
This is really nice. Once I am in this 'search' mode, I couldn't figure out how to get out of this mode.
- Edited to make question more descriptive.
I'm aware that I can do the three finger swipe to look at all of my windows, but that takes over my full screen and the previews constantly move location, so I can't build any muscle memory for it.
Really, I'm just looking for a classic, unobtrusive task switcher that lets me quickly navigate through what's on my screen without having to muddle through anything else (i.e. the Windows taskbar with all collapsing turned off)
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions about using Cmd+Tab or Raycast or Exposé or such, but I'm really just looking for a taskbar equivalent that doesn't require me to use a hotkey or switch "visual contexts". I want something that's persistent and shows the visible applications and their windows, and lets me click on them to raise them. A big part of this for me is being able to see what I have open at a glance, especially due to macOS's historically poor window management.
Edit edit: This is on me for using the words "task switcher" - that brings to mind Alt-Tab when I really meant to refer to the taskbar.
See if that suits your needs
Command-Tab to switch apps, Command-Space to open apps.
Why would I want the Dock?
How do you empty the trash? It's never even occurred to me... how do you get to the trash except via the dock?
GUI: select item(s) and Option-Command-Delete
Command-line: rm -rf folder-or-file-path (or srm to securely remove)
Good news: there's a command under the Finder menu (to the left of File) "Empty Trash..."
Bad news: there's no obvious easy way to view the contents of the Trash before emptying it, without clicking on it in the dock. It's not under "Go", you can't add it to the sidebar either with Settings or by dragging it, and various instructions to navigate to "~/.Trash" don't work in Sequoia.
Good news: But you can add it to the sidebar by opening the Trash and using File > Add to Sidebar. And it shows up with its nice custom trash icon.
Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
You also do things like (for example) start a drag, ⌘+tab to show running apps, then drop on an app icon without using the dock.
I always only use cmd-tab to open the switcher, then I use arrow keys to pick an application, up/down arrows to view an application’s windows (arrow keys and enter to select a specific one)
You can also hit Q to quit an application from the switcher and probably more things I’m currently forgetting.
As repetitive as these top-tips threads can be, we need one every now and again. Someone's guaranteed to learn something from them, and I'm grateful it was my turn today.
The way I learned these shortcuts was reading macOS's help back in 2007, but the quality of documentation bundled with macOS has gone downhill quite a bit.
To swap between applications, use Cmd-Tab.
To swap between open windows of the current application you can use Cmd-Backtick.
Cmd-Tab, up arrow, arrow keys to the window you want, enter
Install Alfred or Raycast and Command+Space your way to everything. Its 100x faster. I can launch any app in about 3 key strokes, which takes < 2 seconds and often less than a second with muscle memory.
For example cmd+space+c will launch or switch to chrome. cmd+space+py is pycharm, cmd+space+go is goland, cmd+space+fi is finder, cmd+space+me is messages, cmd+space+1 is 1Password. cmd+space+1p+space will start searching 1Password.
That launches apps. You can also just start doing math problems (calculator) by just cmd+space and start typing out a math equation. cmd+space+ai+space and just start asking a question to AI.
These only scratch the surface. But cmd+space, which is an easy modifier combo that you can do anytime, will basically unlock unlimited power. Once you get the muscle memory down you can literally launch any app in less than a second without even looking. If the app is already open, it just brings that app to foreground. Once you have that, you can use alt+tab to switch between apps that are already open. This is useful if you are just swapping between two or three apps for reference quickly. Furthermore alt+tilde (the squiggle key above tab and below escape on most latin keyboards) will switch between open windows of the same type. FOr example if you have 2 chrome windows open, it will switch only between those windows.
FYI shift+cmd+space is also 1Password's quick access shortcut
Fast enough for me.
I started using an app called Sidebar:
I find it superior to the dock. The applications on the task bar are persistent and only those active on the current desktop are shown. It handles multiple monitors too.
It has a few quirks I haven’t sorted out yet, but the overall experience is much closer to Windows 11.
Pro Tip: I use it conjunction with the dock by putting the dock on the side and shrinking the dock down to its smallest size and increasing the magnification effect.
The only difference I see is that the windows taskbar provides a preview thumbnail when hovering over the icons. In which case, there's apps you can get for that.
Except that there is, and with multiple ways to do so:
1) CMD+Backtick
2) ALT+Tab + down/up arrow
3) force clicking the app icon
4) Clicking on "Show all windows"
5) Exposé
As far as I can tell, the only thing that's different between the windows task bar and the mac dock is the preview thumbnails.
It will get out of the way on smaller screens, though. As soon as a window gets close to the previews, they get out of the way, unlike the dock.
https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/
There's a detailed FAQ.
As others have said, CMD+Space is sufficient, just hide the dock.
Kinda like command palette for every app, I like it. Would be even better if it preselected the matching option.
Unfortunately, this is broken in Firefox – they’ve bound ⌘ ? to their help page, and it opens then immediately closes the Help menu. You can rebind it to something else (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ /) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → Firefox, menu title: Get Help.
One other problem is, it doesn’t always find the command I’m looking for. E.g. when I typed “dev”, it didn’t show “Web Developer Tools” at first. I then checked Tools menu (it was there), then tried typing it in the Help menu again, and sure enough, it found it this time.
Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Hold Option while resizing a window to resize from the center of the window. Hold Shift while resizing a window to lock the aspect ratio.
When a window is inactive, use the Command key to interact with it without making it active.
If an app has windows in multiple spaces, click the app's Dock icon repeatedly to cycle through the spaces with that app's windows.
Quickly move the Dock to a different side of the screen by holding Shift while dragging the resize handle.
Press ⌘B to search the web for the current query. Press ⌘⏎ or ⌘R to reveal the selected file in Finder. Use the name: filter to only search in the filename. Add kind:folder to only search for folder names. Hold Command to show the path to the currently selected file.
QuickTime Player: Grab a single frame from a video by pausing on the desired frame (using the Left and Right arrow keys to navigate individual frames) and pressing ⌘C.
Photo Booth: Hold Option while taking a picture to skip the countdown. Hold Shift while taking a picture to disable the screen flash.
This is the one feature I miss most from using macos. I got used to it back when Ubuntu used unity as its DE and called it "HUD". Didn't work everywhere (looking at you, java), but a huge timesaver.
But I always wondered if there is a place where you can find all of them, for reference.
TIL. Amazing little hack.
Windows does this much, much better. I can't think of a feature where you need to use the Windows key to modify the options presented in the GUI (though the Windows key has some unique shortcuts). I'm sure someone else will correct me.
Apple has a concise list of keyboard shortcuts/modifiers listed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650
> By default, clicking inside a scroll bar will scroll partially towards the clicked location. Hold Option while clicking in the scroll bar to jump directly to the clicked location.
There is no way to present this option in the GUI without cluttering up the scroll bar, so neither Windows nor macOS do so. But at least this feature is available for power users.
I admit that in places where there IS space in the UI (menu bar, right click), I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
Most likely to keep menus reasonably short and usable, which is particularly important on the smaller Macbooks and on iPads in Sidecar mode which can easily turn long menus into scrolling messes.
Also, progressive disclosure. This way allows the options to exist without overwhelming less technical users.
Holding Shift and clicking scrollbar does jump directly to the clicked location on Windows.
Press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
This was my favorite, but no longer works on Sequoia or whenever was the version that changed modal dialogs.
- Also, Houdahspot (https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/) for advanced searching and file-filtering (you can even exclude results from certain folders). It has search templates, saved searches (which appear as files in Finder), and the ability to export the current search as a Smart Folder (amazing!).
I just wish that Smart Folders worked on iOS and Dropbox …
https://gist.github.com/devnoname120/4767a0aa18879217170fd0c...
Disclaimer: I wrote this. It's a random gist that I wrote for me but it somehow got 150+ stars. Tbh I'm not even sure how people even heard about it because I didn't post it anywhere… Either way I guess people seem to like it, so hopefully you will find it useful too!
> When Macbook Air M1 is sleeping, external screens connected via USB-C keep waking up every few minutes and then go straight to sleep again.
is fixed in Sonoma (yay!)
I dig these cheat sheets but wow, what a total shift in paradigm from when you had one mouse button and if a feature wasn’t discoverable then it wasn’t shipped
Their design philosophy has always been discoverability for regular features, and then these extra "hidden" features for power users.
Nothing has changed.
cmd+opt+shift+esc force quits the current app (cmd+opt+esc opens the force quit window, as the former doesn't work sometimes).
Cmd+q quits the current app, and, when command is held and we're cycling through apps with cmd+tab, it quits the currently selected app. If you need to quit multiple apps at once, hold cmd, press tab to select the apps to quit, and just quit them with q.
Cmd-click a window that is not currently focused; it'll register the click without making that window take the foreground
I always miss that separation between command key and control key in other OSes.
As far as I've seen, this is the only app for Mac that doesn't just reuse Spotlight search (which I find to be terrible).
I looked for exactly this type of app for years before finding it, and when I did, it didn't seem real with the old-fashioned website and zero mentions on sites like HN. But I can assure that it works great and it's maintained. I just wish the author would promote it better so it gets more attention and isn't so hard to find.
Not working for me on Sonoma, which is too bad because this always gets me when I think I've scrolled up.
I’m really wondering why there are no quality Windows alternatives to such apps like Alfred, Dropover, BTT, Karabiner, etc.
Press ⌘L to clear the output from the previous command.
If you need a pixel ruler, ⇧⌘4 and hit Escape to discard the screenshot
> Drag a file or folder from Finder into an open/save dialog to jump directly to that file.
Doesn't work consistently anymore (Sequoia 15.2). Instead of focusing on the file, it moves the file you selected from Finder to the folder shown in the save dialog. It completely breaks the workflow.
Surprisingly, it works as expected one out of ten times. It seems to depend on where on the save dialog you drag the file from Finder. Extremely frustrating!
Definitely seems like a bug. Maybe you have some kind of system extension interfering? Or I hate to tell you to reinstall macOS, but hopefully that would fix it?
I’ve looked into MacOS approaches to achieve the same functionality in the past, but I never seemed to find anything of use. I’m wondering if anybody here would be aware of a solution.
(I'd been mapping individual app configs to this for years before finding this, but the seamless OS-wide application is big upgrade)
I use this pretty frequently and it’s always a drag to find when an app doesn’t implement it. It feels so silly to be forced to manually open/close numerous items when most other apps I use can expand/collapse them all in one go.
I am not affiliated with them.
Shift command slash, got it.
> Press ⌃F2 to move keyboard focus to the application's menu bar. Start typing the first few letters of a menu title to jump to that menu.
Control F2? Control shift F2? None of those work on macOS Sequoiua.
You can also double right-click the video itself and enter Picture-in-Picture mode from that menu
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ea3aye/qspace_fil...
(I like the functionality in QSpace. I just happened to be looking for a Finder replacement a day before this post came out and downloaded whole bunch of them)
Creating a file at a path where I have my file explorer is so ingrained in me. It feels awful when I have to open an app then click through to save file where I want all those clicks are supper annoying because I already was in that place.
Awful thing getting current path from Finder to paste it in save dialog is also not really easy. So I am just not creating new files on MacOS.
On one hand I kind of get the idea that well you start with opening an app and then save your work and most likely it could be in default documents folder.
But years of other way I was used to work it feels annoying.
Basically I use Windows for like 30 years now and in that last 10 I use MacOs as primary OS for my personal device.
I don't miss anything about Windows.
Except this.
I've been using a Mac for 15 years now, and I still want to right-click and create an empty text document.
This requires about 5 to 10 minutes to set up. You'll find instructions for this on the web or via some LLM. I've looked right now for a suitable article, but the ones I've found are subtly different from my Quick Action. I've asked ChatGPT and its instructions seem to be correct.
For screenshots:- does anyone know of a way to take scrolling screenshots? I often need to take screenshots of webpages that are long.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/take-screenshots-firefo...
I always look for it in the three little dots that are next to the 'x' in the dev tools drawer, but it's actually behind the dots in the top nav that show screen dimensions, throttling, device orientation, etc.
I hate the Finder. I used to use an app called cols that resized finder windows to an appropriate size. Stuck it in the finder toolbar. I looked for the applescript but can't find it. How tough is it to fill the finder window with all the columns so that the Magic Mouse doesn't wag the columns back and forth? Just fill the window. Cols, anyone?
I have 32" display and I'm using all my windows maximized, I just don't ever want them side by side or something like that.
I am not sure if I agree with the choice either, but that’s the explanation.
EDIT: I meant window maximized to fill the screen, not fullscreen, which is what option-double-clicking a window corner does.