Transcription
Howdy there folks. I'm Quinn of Snazzy Labs. Look, this is a bit of an odd time, and I hope you and your families are staying safe. I am here despite weird additional things on top of the existing things, like an earthquake we had the other day. But other than that, everything is going well. And I figured, look, if we're spending most of our time at home, what better time to learn some new Mac tips? Because we do have some time to kill.
I've done videos over the last several years, and I've decided to kind of go through all of these videos, compiled the best tips, and then find the last few remaining ones I haven't talked about before and make a big old list of fantastic Mac tips. This is that video. It's a little long, but there are over 180 tips, so sit down, get some popcorn. Unless you learn in just about every Mac user knows about Quick Look, and as well they should. You select a file, you press the spacebar, and it shows you a preview of the file without having to open it in its default application. You also have probably seen the fullscreen button, as well as the open with button. But I prefer to perform both of those actions in a little different way. If you have a file selected, you can actually just press Option Command Y, and that will immediately open a full-screen Quick Look/preview.pdf.pk.
It exists. Another thing you can do that I like is if you have a Quick Look preview opened, just press Command O, and that will open the default application. One of the reasons I prefer to do it this way is Command O is better than clicking this button. But you'll note that when I quit the application, the Quick Look preview is still present. If you click the button here, that's not the case, and it goes away. Quick Look also works inside of stacks in a Dock, which a lot of people don't know. Because you go to click this file, and it automatically opens in the default app. But if you have your mouse hovered over an item, just have your cursor over the top, press the spacebar, and a Quick Look preview will open. It even works with 3D objects, which is pretty cool.
To take things a little bit further, I use an app called BetterZip. BetterZip is a paid app, but they have a free utility as part of BetterZip that allows you to view inside of an archive with Quick Look. It's really cool. You can open up a zip without having to actually decompress that zip file. There are a lot of other really cool Quick Look plugins to support ported file formats, as well as add features. Check it out at quicklookplugins.com, and I'll leave that below.
Do Not Disturb. You probably know how to enable it. You type Control Center, you scroll up, not very intuitive, and you press Do Not Disturb. You can actually do this a lot faster. Just hold down the Option key and then tap Control Center, and that will toggle on/off.
Batch renaming files in Finder is a really powerful way to get things done and organized quickly. Select a bunch of files that you want to rename, you right-click, and then press Rename Five Items. You can replace text with something else. So if you have, for example, a camera that has DCIM_whatever the picture number is, you can replace that with a trip like Canada 2020 or something like that. You can also go into Add Text, which allows you to add text to the beginning, or you can append it to the end. You can also go into Format, which allows you to just straight-up rename all the files by calling it Name or Extension or whatever, as well as the date or a counter and index, and then where the numbers begin. Really pretty handy.
Window management has never been macOS's strong suit. I think this is an area where Windows does a much better job. Now, you can mimic Windows functionality by using an app like Magnet or BetterSnapTool, and you really should. But Apple has added slight improvement in functionality in recent versions of macOS. Inside of the title bar, if you hold down the green radio button, you can choose to tile the window left or right, which allows you to do this kind of weird full-screen mode. You can also resize or rescale it. If you have multiple applications, it's okay, but get Magnet.
Look at the top of your Finder toolbar. Do you know what all of those icons do? I'm betting you don't. That's because the default toolbar, I think, is a little bit over the top and unnecessary. Furthermore, there's some things like this Connect, where you can connect to a server, that I use way more than something like Tags, which I've removed from my title bar from my toolbar in macOS. All you have to do is right-click on the toolbar, select Customize, and you can drag and drop things to your heart's content. It's a really great way to make the toolbar your own. You can also, if you're a total psychopath, choose to display Icon and Text or Text Only, which is just horrible, so don't do that. Another thing you can do is you can drag a folder, an application, or a file into your toolbar. For example, if I use OnePassword all the time, you just hold down Command and you can drag it right into your toolbar, and it gets added right there. Pretty handy. You can also add folders if there are frequently accessed folders you want to add without adding them over here to your sidebar. To remove them from up here, you just hold down Command and drag them off, and they will disappear.
Finder preferences are awesome, and I feel like nobody goes into them. Go to Finder and then Preferences, and there's a bunch of really cool settings, but I'm gonna highlight my favorite. Number one, you can show a bunch of these items on your desktop, like externally mounted disks and servers. Most of these are disabled by default, and I like to turn them back on because it just, I don't know, it brings back a more visual look to your operating system and to your desktop. When you open a new Finder window, it automatically shows the Recents folder, and I never use this folder at all. I much prefer to show the Desktop, and so that's where I leave mine. And then on the Advanced tab, there are a couple of things that you can do. For one, I think you should remove all items from the Trash after 30 days. I mean, if it's been sitting in there for a month, probably don't need it, delete it. But these two are the ones that I really, really like. Let me show you.
If I go into my Downloads folder and I sort by name, you can see that it just mixes all of the files by their, well, their name. Ah, that's a bit of a frustration, though, because some folders are static inside of parent folders, and they really need to be more present. And so if you click this right here, it keeps all of your folders organized by name at the very top, and then it deals with the files that are inside of this root folder. It's a really great way to keep things a little bit more organized in an otherwise disorganized default folder.
Hidden files, they're a thing, and Windows makes it really easy for you to toggle them on and off. macOS does too, but it's not very obvious because it's not in any of these menus up here. But if you press Shift Command Period, that will show all of your hidden files system-wide. To get them to go away again, press Shift Command Period, and they will disappear. This is really, really nice if you're a developer or dealing with files that macOS tries to hide.
Furthermore, accessing frequent folders is pretty easy by using Shift Command and then a letter. So to access Applications, that's Shift Command A. To access Desktop, Shift Command D. Shift Command I takes you to iCloud Drive. Shift Command O takes you to Documents, and Shift Command R takes you to AirDrop.
Another thing that used to be a default that isn't anymore, and it drives me bananas. Go to View and then click Show Path Bar. This will show you a visual path of where you are on your file system. Now, sure, you can right-click the title bar, and that will show you as well, but this is a better way to do it, and you can just double-click to navigate to that folder.
Another thing you should enable. Go to View and then click Show Status Bar. This shows you information about the drive that you're currently on, as well as the folder that you're inside. Handy. You should enable it. They're both great.
The great thing about Finder is it allows you to toggle through whichever view you prefer, be that icons, a list, panes, and or this weird cool Quick Look mode. But you can also use hotkeys by pressing Command One, that shows you grid. Command Two, Command Three, Command Four, and so on. Now, look, like I mentioned, this is a pretty cool little thing, but it's not a very practical view when you have a lot of files. But if you are in a view that you prefer, you can press Shift Command P, and that will toggle on and off this handy little preview pane. It's still active, you can still preview files and videos. It's really great if you want to turn it back off. While you just press Shift Command P again, and it disappears. But I tend to leave it on because it shows cool metadata and a bunch of nerdy stuff like that.
In List View, you can also resize the columns pretty easily. So let's get into a folder where we have a bunch of files over here. So if we go into pane view here, we go. We need multiple folders. Okay, here we go. Great. So if I scale up one pane, things get pretty weird. And you've also probably noticed that sometimes one pane is like super huge, and the other ones are small. Well, if you hold down the Option key, this equally resizes all of the panes at the same time. Really pretty handy. Oh, but we're not done yet. If you're in this List View, which is my favorite view, you can't really quite see these because they're too tiny. But you don't want to go into Quick Look. Just press Command and Plus, and that shows you a slightly larger List View. To get it to get small again, press Command Minus, and it goes smaller yet again.
Most people probably use Spotlight to find files, and I can blame you. It's a great way to do things. But if you're a little bit more of a power user or you need to do a more refined search, you can use the search bar inside of Finder and or press Command F to open a dedicated search window. And this is where things get cool because this is really powerful. For example, if you search "screenshot," that's not going to be very handy because there are a bunch of files with that in their metadata. So what you can do is actually put the file that you're searching for in quotes, and that will only search for it so long as it appears in the name of the file and or inside of the content itself. So this is DaVinci Resolve manual. I open this up, and somewhere in this document, it says PDF. So it looks like I need to refine even further. I can say, "Okay, well, if the kind is an image, then show it to me." And now it looks like I've got basically only screenshots.
You can, however, search a number of other attributes. You've probably never gone in here because it's kind of spooky. But if I search, let's say, for example, JPG, I can go in here and type "other," and there are a ton of attributes to which you can use. I'm going to use there's one called ISO. So this is the ISO speed. I'm going to add this. And so if the ISO speed equals 200 on my camera, show me those files. Okay, here are photos that have been taken with an ISO of 200. Pretty dang cool.
Things get even more intense with Smart Folders, and this is where some Boolean logic comes in. If you go into File in Finder, you can actually create a new Smart Folder. And most people have never done this before because they are extremely intimidating. Let me show you how to do this. So let's do a screenshot folder again. This basically will go through the system and add any files that meet our search queries. So let's say I want to create a folder that automatically adds all of my screenshots that are PNG files. You can see right here, it's showing PNG files and JPEG files. And again, that DaVinci Resolve PDF, that's no good. So what I can do is press this plus button, and then if I say, "If the file is an image," then show up. But let's say I want to go even further because I don't want PNG, I just want JPGs. Go JPEG, and there you go. It only shows JPEGs. But let's say I wanted to show PNGs and JPEGs, but not, for example, the PDF to the DaVinci Resolve manuals. In if I go to Kind and then say "is an image" and "it's a PDF or a PNG," suddenly all of them are gone. Why is that? Well, it's because it's trying to find files that are both a JPG and a PDF or a PNG. That's obviously not what I want. So what you can do is you can actually hold down the Option key, and see how that plus turned into a little ellipses there? Tap the ellipses, and it adds Boolean logic. So what I can say is, "If any of the following are true," then add it to my Smart Folder. And so I can say Kind is an image, is a JPEG, and then I can add one and say Name. Kind is an image, is a PNG. I can say, "If any of the following are true," so it will then search for PNGs and JPEGs. Conversely, I could say, "If none of them are true," and it will show me, for example, that DaVinci Resolve PDF. Pretty cool way to find things a little bit more intently. And then, of course, you can save the folder as an actual folder on your desktop or wherever you want.
If you copy a file in Finder and then paste it in another folder, it creates a duplicate, which is probably the behavior you'd expect. Unfortunately, you cannot use the Cut function like you can in Windows File Explorer. You press Command X, and nothing happens. What you can do, though, is press Command C to copy the file, and then if you use Option Command V, that actually moves the original file into its new source destination. Option Command V to move a file instead of just create a duplicate.
In most web browsers, if you accidentally close a tab, you can press Command Z to reopen that tab. In some older browsers or browsers that haven't been updated, you can perform the same function by pressing Shift Command T. That will restore your previous tab. Now, in Safari, if you quit the app accidentally or you close an entire window, you can reopen your previous session by pressing Shift Command T. That will reopen all of the tabs that you had before. Pretty handy.
Safari also has this really cool ability to set per-site settings. If you go into Safari and you press Settings for This Website, you can see that it allows you to toggle your content blockers on and off, to use the Reader app when available, to set your page zoom, to set whether or not videos autoplay, and it will remember these settings even after you leave and in the future come back to the website later on. This is pretty cool. You can, however, set system-wide, or I should say Safari-wide settings, by going to Preferences and then going to Privacy or going to Websites, rather, and then selecting the category or topic you want to moderate. So autoplay video, for example. I hate autoplay video, and so I have it to set by default to never autoplay video. This is a problem on websites like YouTube, for example, because I want you to autoplay video. So if I go into the per-site site, or if I find a website where I want the video to play, I can press the play button, and it will begin playing. I can also go into Settings for This Website and change it back. By default, Safari has stopped media with all sound, and that's probably good. But out of principle, I just don't want any website to be streaming video unless I have asked for it. So that's what I do. But this is, you know, I mean, you can set these settings from zoom to camera to microphone, a bunch of different permissions that you would be surprised to know you have granularity on. Pretty cool.
This one is okay. Probably everyone knows this one because it is cross-platform and has been around for decades. But when you're on a form, you can advance fields by pressing the Tab key. You can also press the space and then the Tab key to go backwards. In macOS, when you've selected a drop-down menu, you can press space to toggle through that menu and use the arrow keys to make your selection. Or you can actually even just type the year or the number that you want to type out. So, for example, if I want to do 2023, I just type that on on my keyboard, and that now selects that automatically. If you have a checkbox, you can go to the text box, you press spacebar, and it automatically toggles that checkbox on and off.
This is one that's been known for ages, but I figured I'd mention it anyway. Let's say for whatever reason you want to recover browser history on your computer. Sometimes you can accidentally delete it, or you delete it as per routine, and then you need to go back and find something, or maybe you have more investigative motives. What you can do is press Shift Command G to say "Go to Folder," and then you're going to go to your User folder, Library, and Safari, and press Go. Then, once you get to this file, you'll see a file called history.db. If you select the history.db file and then you open up Time Machine, you can press Enter Time Machine, and that will show you a history of this file in your operating system. It will save it for time and all eternity, and you can go back and look at it as far as you have backups.
Now, let's say now that you know this, that wait a minute, I don't really want my internet browsing history being backed up. Well, if you go to System Preferences and then you go to Time Machine, you can press Options, and in this window, you can drag any file or a folder or whatever you want to have it excluded from your Time Machine backups. Which for sensitive data or data that you don't want backed up and possibly recoverable in the future, even if that drive is encrypted, that's maybe not a bad thing to do.
Okay, here's some rapid-fire Safari tips. Command L allows you to instantly see the address bar and to select text or to cut or to paste or to go to a new website. This works in more browsers as well. You can also press Command Shift + / to see all of the tabs open in your current window in Safari. You can also press Command Shift and then bracket. The right bracket goes forward, and the left bracket goes backwards. This works also in Finder and just about any tabbed application you can imagine. So Command Shift and then tab forward or excuse me, bracket left and bracket right to go forwards and backwards. Pretty handy.
Okay, let's say there's a website you really, really like. I can think of one, YouTube. And you want to add YouTube as a little applet in your Dock. You can actually do this by just selecting the little bookmarklet here and dragging it over to your Dock. Problem is, that hardly looks good. Three YouTube and then a globe. I'm gonna show you how to make this look a little bit better. Drag this bookmarklet to your desktop, and then you can rename it to whatever you want. We're gonna name it to YT. You can then go to the internet and search "YouTube logo," and we're gonna try and find a transparent one that looks pretty good. So we're gonna go Tools, Color, Transparent. And here we go. Let's say this is the logo we want. We can right-click it and copy image to our clipboard. And then we can go into this to get info on this little bookmarklet in the Finder. So File and Get Info, or Command I, and then click this little bookmarklet thing right there, and then just paste Command V. And that will paste the image you have in your clipboard. To make this little bookmarklet, you can then drag it to your Dock. And heck, you can even delete the one on your desktop if you want. And any time that I click this little button in my Dock, it'll automatically open YouTube. It kind of looks like an app, even though it's a website. Pretty cool. This works and will open in whatever your default browser is, be that Chrome or Edge or what have you. Pretty nice.
Speaking of YouTube, you probably watch YouTube while you're trying to kill some time in the background. I certainly do. So click a video that you're watching, and then you can right-click on YouTube. You have to do it twice. On most other video websites, you just do it once. But right-click twice, and then you can say "Enter Picture in Picture." And this allows you to go about doing your things as you would without having to close the video. You can still see it. You can resize it. You can move it to any corner of the screen you want. And then, of course, you can bring it back to the tab that you want to play it in, as well as pausing it. Picture-in-Picture is pretty cool.
Okay, let's talk keyboard shortcuts. We're gonna start off with the ones that you probably most certainly already know. Command W closes a window. Command T opens a new tab. Command N opens a new window. Command O opens the file that you want to open inside the app you're located. And Command H hides the application, which you can summon back. And then Command Q quits the application for good. And I don't know why, but Safari isn't quit. There we go.
Alright, let's get a little more advanced. Surely you've noticed when copying text from the web or something that when you paste it, it also pastes the formatting. In most text editing applications, but in this instance, I don't want that. So how do I paste this while this is getting bolded and everything like that? All you have to do is press Shift Option Command V, and then it pastes unformatted text. So to paste unformatted text, that's Shift Option Command V, and it will paste unformatted.
All right, let's talk screenshots. Shift Command 3 takes a screenshot of the entire desktop as you can view and delete or save. You press Shift Command 4, and that allows you to take a picture of a selection. Well, you can also do is press Shift Command 4 and then press the spacebar, and that allows you to grab a window. So if I want to grab Tweetbot, I click that, and that grabs a picture, a screenshot of just this window. Now, you'll see that it adds like a nice little kind of window to effect, a little shadow down below to make it look good. If you don't want the shadow, you press Shift Command 4 again, press the spacebar, and then instead of pressing screenshot immediately, hold down the Option key as you click the window, and that will take a screenshot without any formatting. It just does the window squared out, no shadow, and you're ready to rumble.
Okay, let's say you want to do a selection with Shift Command 4, but you're like, "Oh no, this is not what I wanted to grab." Well, if you hold down the spacebar, you can actually move the box to wherever you want, and then it just resumes from your starting point. So if I drag it to here, I can resize from here. If I want to go really narrow, I could go right here and then resize like that. You can also resize from the origin, which is pretty handy. I know some people like doing that. So you can hold down the Option key, and then it resizes from the middle of the box, which is pretty handy. And then to take a picture, you just let go.
Okay, everyone else, how to adjust volume? It's literally a button on the keyboard. Well, if you hold down the spacebar as you adjust volume, you'll actually get an audible click, which is nice to know how loud the volume is that you're turning up. If you want more finite control, you can hold down Shift Option and then move your volume key, and that will actually allow you to adjust in increments of 1/4, which is pretty neat. You can also do this with screen brightness as well.
Okay, so you don't have a fancy Touch Bar. Now, maybe you do, but you don't like using it. I certainly don't. You can access the emoji character palette by pressing Control Command Space. So Control Command Space on any Mac, and this will allow you to actually search by emojis. So you can type "annoyed," and the emojis for annoyed come up. It's a lot handier than trying to scroll through the dumb Touch Bar finding the one emoji that you want.
Most people know about Command Tab, which allows you to navigate through your open applications. You let go, and then that application you let go on becomes the foreground app. You can also go backwards through this list by pressing Shift Command Tab, and it it's going backwards. Or you can also press Command Tab, open it, and navigate forward, and then instead of tapping the Tab key, tap the grave key, which is directly above the Tab key, and that will allow you to cycle back and forth. So grave's backward, Tab forward. Wow, why do you need to know that? Oh, let's say you're also in an app with multiple windows open. You can do the same thing. Command grave cycles through the open windows, and then Shift Command grave cycles through in reverse order. Pretty handy.
Alright, this is one that a lot of people don't know, but it's kind of handy. If you don't know how to spell a word and you don't want to wait for spell check to try and help you out, or you spell it so wrong, you don't spell check doesn't even know how to help you. You can start typing a word and then you press F5, and that comes up with a little tab that basically has every plausible word that could end with the first several letters you typed, and usually it guesses pretty much right. And so I can never spell that word, and now I press F5, it completes, and I'm ready to rumble.
If you have a laptop or Magic Trackpad, you can select a word and then three-finger tap it, and it has this cool feature called Lookup, which allows you to look up the definition or search for an address online or call a number. It's pretty handy. The problem is, if you're on an older Mac or you're on a desktop computer and don't have them, how do you perform this function? It's pretty easy. Just press Control Command D, and that will use Lookup just as it would if you had a trackpad.
Most people know about Spotlight's functionality beyond basic file searching, like basic arithmetic or being able to search for currency conversion or temperature or distance. But what a lot of people don't know is that you can actually go beyond that when searching for files. For example, I can type "kind" and then a colon and then type "Photoshop," and that will show me all of the files on my system that are compatible with Photoshop. And you can pair that with a specific search term. So I can search "patent" and then "kind Photoshop," and it will show me all of the files that meet those terms. Pretty cool. It also uses natural language. So I could search, for example, "PDF from last month," and that will show me all of the PDFs on my system that have been created in the last month. I know that one doesn't sound like it's been created in the last month, but it has, I promise. You can also search for something like stocks by searching the stock ticker you want, or flights, or movies by typing in "showtimes" or "show local movies" and allow you to purchase tickets from there. Pretty cool. Spotlight is neat. I'm still gonna use Alfred.
The next set of tips uses the macOS Terminal, which you can find in Spotlight by searching Terminal or finding it inside the Utilities folder of the Applications folder. You're just going to copy and paste these, and then you'll be able to run these commands pretty easily. The first one is being able to change the format in which you capture screenshots. By default, it uses PNG, which is relatively low compression, really high-quality image format. But the downside is, on example, this 4K display, it's not even a 5K display, it is a 25.5 megabyte screenshot. That's a little too large. Let's change that file format to JPEG. You just paste the command, and then the type we're going to find as .jpg. We run that command. We can now take a new screenshot, save it to our desktop, and we'll see that if we get the info on this, it's a lot smaller at just 3.8 MB. You can change it to basically any file type you want: PNG, GIF, PDF, TIFF. The options are limitless.
By default, the Mac App Store only checks for updates once per week. That's a pretty long time to go without checking for updates. If you're someone who wants to keep things up to date a little bit more frequently, or perhaps wants to keep things up to date with less frequency, you can paste the following command, which tells the software update manager how often to fetch updates. At the very end, it asks for an integer value, and you enter a number, and that's the number of days. So by default, it's seven, but you could change it to 14 days if you wanted to wait two weeks. If you wanted to check every day, you type one, press Enter, and that's it.
You've probably noticed when trying to hold down a key on your keyboard before, this little contextual character accent menu pops up. This can be pretty handy if you type in different languages, but if you don't, and you just want to rage on your keyboard, this can be an annoying feature. And there's a way to turn it off. Just paste this following command into Terminal, run it, and then when you reopen your apps, you'll notice that you can hold down any amount of letters you want, and it'll just go forever and ever and ever, never, never. If you want to re-enable the default behavior, change the boolean from false to true.
This is one that there are a lot of free utilities for, and so it's not very popular anymore, but I don't like menu bar widgets. I just like to run this when I need it. It's called Caffeinate. So if you type Caffeinate into your Terminal window, your Mac will stay on forever. It ignores all of the energy saver settings. It won't go to sleep, the screen won't turn off. It just, well, drinks a lot of caffeine. This can be handy if you're downloading a large file or you're rendering video, you're trying to upload something, and you really don't want the system saying it's time to go to sleep when it's actually not. Just be aware, your computer will not turn off until you disable this command by pressing Control C.
You may notice when you open up a document and try to print it, that the print dialog isn't the full print dialog you want it to show the whole thing, but it just, it doesn't. That's a weird default behavior that just doesn't display for whatever reason. If you print the following command and press Enter, the next time you open up the file and the next time you run the print dialog, it will show you that full detailed print dialog box. Pretty handy. I don't know why you wouldn't run this one. You'd be nuts to have this little tiny one and be complacent with it.
You know the classic macOS startup chime? The mmm, yeah. Apple removed that a number of years ago, and it's super sad. But guess what? It's actually able to be added back by re-enabling it in the firmware. Run the command `sudo nvram startup-mute=%00` and then equals percent zero zero, and that will enable it. You will have to enter your admin password because you are running it as administrator. But once you do that, it will make the noise. If you decide you don't like that, you liked a future where everything's quiet, turn the very about back to zero one from zero zero, and it will turn off.
Okay, this one's a little bit of a quirky one. Let's say your Dock just feels a little bit too cluttered, and you want to organize stuff by category or task. You can actually add a spacer into your Dock by running the following command. Now, you are going to have to run it for every space that you intend to add. So if you want two spaces, you're going to need to run it twice. And then at the end, you're going to need to run `killall Dock`. Your screen will go black for a second, don't freak out, but the Dock will come back into play, and you'll notice that there are now two spaces in there that I can move to separate my work from my play. Pretty cool.
You might have noticed that I keep my Dock hidden and to the left. This is a really great system, in my opinion, and the way that I prefer to use macOS because you don't lose vertical screen space, which is already limited. But then your Dock is also in a nice place. We're going to access it. The problem is, is that the Dock just takes too long to reveal in macOS. If you run the following command and press Enter, you can then type `killall Dock`, and you'll notice that that delay between when the Dock spawns goes away drastically. I'd like to take this even one step further, and most people don't, but you, you see that it pops out immediately, but it still has this rather long kind of transition effect. You can actually get rid of that too by typing the following. You then press Oops, defaults write, and then there we go. Any type `killall Dock`. It will be fixed in the video description for you guys. And then you'll see that it pops up immediately. It's not very sexy, but it is super handy when you just want your Dock.
Now, that's good. If you open System Preferences and go to Security & Privacy under this General tab, you'll see the ability to set a lock message. Now, you may have to enter your admin password to get this dialog to go away so that you can actually do that. But what happens once your computer unlocks is you can say, "Yes, I'd like to show a message," and you can set that message so that on your lock screen, this message will appear. If someone loses or steals your laptop, you can maybe have your information like your name and phone number, as well as offering a reward to them, so that someone knows whose computer it belongs to if it were to get misplaced.
Want to move a window around in the background without bringing it to the foreground? Hold the Command key down, and then you can move the window in the background without it ever coming to the front. Pretty weird one, but pretty handy.
Okay, let's say you're a millionaire and you can afford to have more than one Mac in your house. If you go into System Preferences and then you go to Sharing, there's a little option called Screen Sharing. And if you turn that on, that allows you to access this computer, the one that you're on right now, from any other Mac on your network. Now, you will still need to enter the admin password, so it is secure, but it can be done. You can even set it such that you can have your computer accessible over VNC. So VNC is compatible with Linux and iPad and iOS and Windows and basically every other platform. So this is a more open standard if you want to share your screen that way, or you can just share with the native built-in screen sharing function built into your computer. To do that, once you've turned it on, to actually utilize it, all you have to do is the following. Go to Finder and then go to Network, and then you'll see suddenly the name of your device as well as an icon. So this is my Mac Mini, Edith LTO. And as soon as I click it, it asks me to share the screen, which I can do, and then suddenly, hey, look, I'm controlling this computer over the network. Pretty cool.
This is an accessibility feature that should just become a standard one because it's so great. Go to Accessibility, then scroll down to Pointer Control or Mouse & Trackpad, depending on your version of macOS, and then click Trackpad Options. So yes, this is one that works with a laptop or a device with a Magic Trackpad. Enable dragging with a three-finger drag. What this means is that you can utilize your trackpad, and as soon as you put three fingers down, you can move windows around without having to press down on the trackpad and then move your finger. From an ergonomic standpoint, it's way handier, and it just, it feels real nice.
The menu bar gets pretty cluttered, even though it is handy. You can move around items by holding down the Command key and moving them around. And then you can also get rid of them by holding down the Command key and then trying to drag them off, or you'll see a little X. You can let go, and they'll disappear. A great way to reorganize the mess up there.
Okay, let's say you need the Wi-Fi password to a Wi-Fi network you're either connected to right now or you have connected to in the past. Open up Keychain Access, which you can access through Spotlight, and then you search the name of the network that you're trying to connect to. It'll pop up, you right-click it, and say "Copy password to keyboard." And then you will type out your keychain password. And then I'm not going to pass you. It might ask you for this. This is anything. Catalinus piece of craft. So you do that, it will allow you to copy it, and then it will be attached to your clipboard. You can paste it in plain text, and you can see once again, oh yeah, that was the Wi-Fi password. Better than writing it on a post-it note and sticking it somewhere.
Hot Corners are awesome. Drag your cursor to the corner of the screen, and it will perform an action that you've set. They're really, really handy, but sometimes they're a little too easy to trigger. If you go into Desktop & Screen Saver, type Screen Saver, click Screen, and then go down to Hot Corners, you can actually program these to only trigger with a modifier key. So I can hold down the Command key and then say Mission Control, press OK, and now Mission Control will only launch if I'm holding down the Command key. This is a really great way to still have Hot Corners, but to make them a little bit more difficult to access. You can also change these. It doesn't have to be Control. It can be or Command. It can be Control, or it can even be Control Command. Pretty cool. If you want to add modifier keys, unfortunately, you still can only do one per corner, even with modifier keys.
I don't use the iCloud password manager, so I can't really show you this one. But if you did, you could say, "Hey Siri, show me the password to this website," and it would actually open up the password manager on macOS and show you the password that you want it to use, and you could go and copy it to the clipboard. Pretty cool.
Inside of iMessage on your Mac, you can tap Details, and you can silence or toggle Do Not Disturb on a specific thread. You can also, and this is pretty handy, share your screen with that individual if they are on an iOS device. Pretty cool to share your Mac with another person if you want to show them how to do something or you need help yourself.
This one is super 2000s, but one I still absolutely love. If you go into Printers & Scanners and System Preferences, and drag your printer to the desktop or to a folder or really anywhere you want, this suddenly becomes an alias that is an active alias. So I could take this file, this rich text file that I want to print, drag it directly on top of the printer, and guess what? The printer prints it automatically without me having to ever open this file and go through the print dialog. Pretty, pretty freaking cool.
If you are on top of your game and your contacts inside your Address Book have their addresses inside of their contact data, you can actually press Command P, bring up a print dialog, and print an addressable envelope from you to them directly. Super, super handy.
Dialog boxes, they're a thing. They're super annoying, but they exist. Like I mentioned earlier, you can use Tab to cycle through the buttons. You can also press Enter to, well, do whatever the action is asking you to do. But if you want to cancel the dialog box and just to get it to go away, press Command Period, and that will always toggle the Cancel button, no matter what the dialog box says.
If you have an iOS device, you can right-click and then press "Take Photo," "Scan Document," or "Sketch" from your specific iOS device. If I do it and press "Take Photo," a prompt comes up on my iPhone immediately. I can turn it around, I press the shutter button, and then it takes this extremely unflattering picture of me, which is automatically inserted into my document over Wi-Fi.
Well, folks, if you found this video helpful, please give it a like. If you didn't, well, that other button seems to work okay. To get subscribed for more awesome tech videos like this one, but most importantly, and as always, stay safe and stay snazzy.