Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

Show hidden files (dotfiles) inside any finder window or file open dialog: Cmd + Shift + .

Discovered after ~10 years

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.

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.

- 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

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/lD2zaSd.png

[1] https://i.imgur.com/SKsQRnQ.png

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)

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204609

[1] https://i.imgur.com/feRhErF.gif

[2] https://getkap.co/

Setting most (but not all) system preference using the terminal. It made doing clean installs every year so much easier. https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos

The keyboard shortcut in finder to take you to your home directory, cmd + shift + h if I recall correctly. Makes it trivial to keyboard navigate to anything when you can easily start from the same place every time!

Cmd-space to bring up spotlight

Type whatever you want.

Cmd-b

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 :)

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 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

That you can hold down certain keys, like i and o, to access a list of similar characters that aren't found on the keyboard.

My 1 year old taught me that one.

Cmd-Ctrl-Space (⌘⌃␣) for the character/emoji picker. Also, under Keyboard in preferences, check the "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar" option to get it as a menu-bar icon. This also includes the keyboard viewer, which is handy to figure certain Shift-Opt-Whaterver combos for seldom-used characters.

EDIT: Updated with the actual default command.

Double click text to select a word. Triple click text to select the whole paragraph.

For decades I assumed that there’s some weird fluky behavior when trying to select a word and accidentally selecting the paragraph.

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.

- Get Info on file. - Check Stationary Pad box.

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.

[1] https://osxdaily.com/2015/05/28/batch-rename-files-mac-os-x-...

Focusing the menubar with Control-F2.

You can then navigate by arrow keys or typing. Space bar activates the highlighted menu/submenu.

It makes life so much better.

Control-F2 itself was slightly broken in 10.14 (IIRC), so I hacked up a dumb workaround in my Hammerspoon config:

https://github.com/NateEag/dotfiles/blob/99f6b641151f85f6f78...

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).

You can tell Finder to show actual folder sizes instead of just "--". Right click in a folder -> Show View Options -> Calculate all sizes. I'm not sure why it's not the default, it's not like Finder needs to traverse the folders hierarchy to calculate the size (I hope!).

The `say` command line tool. It will cause a synthesized voice to speak out loud whatever follows that command via text-to-speech.

This is especially useful for pranking your loved ones for whom you have remote shell access. ssh in and cause the other person’s computer to start talking to them... by name... asking for help... to be let out of the small metal box they’ve been trapped in for SO long...

This has been available in Mac OS for at least 15 years, and probably longer.

You can use image capture app to copy pictures when you connect camera via usb.

If you create a "Developer" folder in your ~ it's gonna have a different icon and is canonical place to put all your code in mac world.

Clicking wifi tray icon while holding option is going to give you a lot more info and some hidden tools.

Using the Touch Bar to adjust volume, brightness, etc. doesn’t have to be a two-step process... no need to tap, lift and re-position your finger to the slider that appears. Instead, just touch-and-hold the icon of the thing you want to adjust, and slide from there.

Cmd + Shift + ? = Easy way to access menus via keyboard

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.

At least I got a new keyboard out of it...

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.

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.

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.

If you run:

    defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture yes

then when you hold ctrl-opt-cmd (the three keys to the left of the space bar, so easy to remember) you can click-and-drag a window from anywhere, not just the title bar. (Note: need to restart app first)

I learned recently that in any terminal you can option click to move the cursor to a specific location in a command. It’s really great when you want to reuse a command but with a small change.

Mac has a storage explorer called "Storage management app". I found it great for making space as it can sort by categories and file size. Before realising this, it was a pain to find decent software for the MacOS.

I imagine this was added recently.

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.

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

You can hover/long press on the green traffic light item to tile your screen.

I once discovered a way to restore a minimized window without using the mouse. It requires a bit of practice:

1. Press Command-Tab to show your running apps. Keep holding Command.

2. Press Tab until you've selected the minimized app.

3. Press the Option key, and let go of the Command key. You must release the Command key after pressing the Option key! The minimized app is now unminimized.

Note that this only works for an app with all of its windows minimized. If there is already a visible window of the app you won't be able to get to the minimized one with this trick.

I posted it once to Super User where it’s still getting attention after 9 years: https://superuser.com/questions/196141/keyboard-shortcut-to-...

Option + Click

And

Command + Option + Shift + Click

Works on most default OS things you can click on. Reveals a whole new set of amazing functionality.

Example: Doing so on the bluetooth icon on your menu bar, gives you the debug option for you to reset / restart bluetooth module.

Every time you do a screen recordin with quicktime, encode it to h264 to save a LOT of space and make it playable on any device.

To do that use Handbrake, whick is open source and the go-to app for any encoding.

Creating one-file pdf from large pdf file with simple page drag to the home screen using Preview.

macOS has a very good built-in text-to-speech engine with real voices that sound good (i.e. not annoying to read).

It's part of the Accessibility > Speech menu in Settings.

I wrote up a little info doc for how to enable keyboard shortcut for it so you can use with any text you can select: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...

Use cases: - read blog posts and news articles while doing dishes (basically turn anything into an podcast at the press of a button) - read hacker news comments - proofreading text (you can hear the typos much easier than you can see them in a text you have written)

After doing cmd + c a file, you can use option + cmd + V to move/cut it instead of copying.

I wonder how someone can read this thread and NOT realize that macOS is probably the most advanced desktop operating system out there.

For anyone who hasn't already rebound Caps Lock to Ctrl - try to accidentally hit Caps Lock really quickly, and it won't activate. Press it normally and it will activate.

I think one of the most magical moments was when I sent a job to print to one printer that was out of paper at the office, and it failed. I just used spotlight to open another printer and dragged the job from one printer to the other and it just worked!

You can drag the folder icon from the top of a finder window into an apps open/save dialog and the dialog will navigate right to it. This also works with files.

If you are taking a partial screenshot but you want to change the position of the selection then press and hold space to pan the selected area.

I have a meta tip for everybody.

I only recently discovered the Youtube channel 'MacMost':

https://www.youtube.com/user/macmostvideo

As a long-time macOS user, I am astounded at the things I'm currently learning from this guy, they're not just 'cool' things, they're seriously productivity-boosting things! They're small but sometimes impactful.

This is the best tip I can give anyone here.

pbcopy / pbpaste (command line tool to access the clipboard)

Not builtin on macOS but iTerm2 is a must (together with oh-my-ZSH it's been a game changer)

The "time machine" on apps has been useful as well, rolling back to a previous version of a doc is great.

Some "unexpected feature" I found the other day. I accidentally dropped my MBP (and it seems it is engineered to close itself on drops but I knew that already ahem so it fell shut and upside down) and it started making a siren-like noise, as I began to get worried, I opened the screen and it was showing only glitches and it restarted (well sh1t). But then it restarted just fine and crisis averted.

"Reduce Motion" in Settings > Accessibility.

At some point in the last 8 years, Apple changed the animation for how a window becomes full screen. The default behavior is to expand while simultaneously shifting the window to the right, or conversely expand while the desktop shifts to the left.

Enabling "Reduce Motion" eliminates that behavior, and the full screen window fades in and out instead, which personally I prefer.

When you Cmd-Tab to an application with no open windows, press option as you release Cmd, and it will open that application's default window (as if you clicked on it on the Dock.)

Useful when you like to leave apps "open" even with all their windows closed (ie. not using Cmd-Q), but still want to use Cmd-Tab to get to the app instead having to click something.

Re-enable the boot chime on the latest Macs with the following command in terminal:

  sudo nvram StartupMute=%00

To turn it back off:

  sudo nvram StartupMute=%01

After searching for an item in Spotlight, hitting `Return` will open the file, but hitting `Cmd` + `Return` will open a Finder window to the directory where that file lives.

Smart Folders + Tags = you move a file between folders by (un)tagging it.

Very handy i. e. for project management (Kanban…)

Cmd + tab to quit applications

Instead of releasing cmd to switch to the application, you can press q to quit it.

You can delete files immediately (i.e., skip moving to the trash) in Finder by holding the Option key in addition to Command + Delete (or Backspace).

Toggle Do Not Disturb with a single click:

https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2020/06/11/1915 (has animated GIF explainer)

A little late to the party, but hopefully these are useful if anyone sees them:

- If you need to make a quick screen recording video, open QuickTime Player. There’s an option to record the screen in the menu.

- (This one’s been extremely useful to me, and hardly anyone seems to know about it!) — If you need to provide tech support to another macOS user, open iMessage on your Mac, and start a conversation with the other person’s Apple ID. Click the dropdown caret beside their name in the recipient list, and click “Ask to share screen”. A VNC request will be sent straight to their Mac (with built-in microphone audio, so you can chat to them), plus options to control their computer remotely.

Command + double click a search item in spotlight to open the containing folder in finder.

Not a Mac built-in feature, but life-changing nonetheless: Amethyst window manager. You can install it with brew cask install amethyst.

It's a tiling window manager. If you've used tmux, i3 or awesomewm you'll feel right at home.

⌘⌃⇧4 – for screenshots that go directly into your clipboard

⌘O – open file/folder in Finder

⌘J in Finder, Set as Defaults — sets default view options for all folders (struggled a lot with Finder inconsistencies before finding this out)

OPTION + CMD + V to cut and paste files (found this today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24080378)

Hold down OPTION to vertically select text (works in the terminal at least)

CMD + SHIFT + . in Finder to show/hide hidden files

CMD + CTRL + D on a selected word to open the dictionary

I'll sometimes use the `say` command to let me know when a long-running command on the terminal finishes (e.g., `say Done`)

Has anyone found a way to name desktop spaces anything other than Desktop 1, Desktop 2 etc?

Fn-Fn turns on speech dictation (if you have it enabled in settings). It is pretty accurate.

Ability to remap the Caps Lock key to Control

Shift+control+command+4 = screen capture to clipboard

Preview can modify images. There's a button with a pencil icon that toggles a toolbar for simple image editing, such as adding lines, shapes, or texts.

Change the cursor movement speed (repeat rate) in the terminal. On the CLI you can go higher than the menu.

    defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 5

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4489885/how-can-i-increa...

Hold down the option key when selecting text (in some editors) and it enables columnar selection. Can be very useful for certain editing tasks.

Forget MacOS, I was practically living on the web for ages before finding out that you can select link text in browsers if you hold down alt.

Adjust volume by finer increments: hold option+shift while changing volume.

System Preferences>Keyboard>Text. I use this to create trigger letter combinations that auto complete things I type frequently, particularly for business correspondence- for example if I type "FRA-", in any application, it prompts me with the option to autocomplete "For routing/assignment" I actually have someones difficult to spell's name in there too but have omitted it here. It"s useful to use ALL CAPS as the trigger. You can even stack the triggers, I have several individuals whom I may send a message to with "FOR ROUTING/ASSIGNMENT". to and I have them all triggered by the same capital letter combo, and I am presented with a dropdown list that use the down arrow to select which I want to use.

I believe desktop Stacks is only a version old (10.14) so you probably haven't been missing it for too long fortunately. Another good tip for screenshots is disabling the floating thumbnail. Just open the screenshot app and disable it in the options menu.

You can move other windows without losing focus by holding command and move window's title.

Double clicking the title bar of a window to maximize it (without going into full screen mode). I used to install Spectacle on every computer, but this was really the only feature I needed from it.

Somehow it took me 12 years of using macOS to learn how to maximize windows.

The caffeinate command: https://brettterpstra.com/2014/02/20/quick-tip-caffeinate-yo...

CMD + UP to up one dir in finder. Maybe I've got messed up settings or something, I don't know, but when I want to go up a folder I don't see a button or a an item called ".." that can be clicked. Did this drive anyone else nuts?

Dictionary word lookup with a single gesture.

https://media.giphy.com/media/Vg5tebSFuj1DFtHwrd/giphy.gif

This is a neat hack for reducing PDF file sizes. As you may know, macOS already has a built-in filter to reduce file size, but for me, it often results in almost unreadable documents. This stackexchange question shows how to create a custom filter which delivers way better results, i.e. small files and very good quality:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/297417/how-to-decr...

I've been using Apple devices for ~25 years now and I think the best feature I have used was the summarizer service (actually I would think that services in general in macOS you should look through). What it does is if you select some text it will summarize it.

While I was in Brazilian jujitsu class they had an MMA brand that needed "organic content" based on articles from wikipedia and I bartered with them so that I would receive a Jujitsu Gi for summarizing 150 articles. This allowed me to accomplish the above task in only a few hours.

Unmounting/ejecting a drive by dragging its desktop icon to the trash. I know you did this in really old macs to eject a floppy, but it's cool they keep that feature around on modern macOS

Option click on the upper right corner hamburger menu toggles Do Not Disturb mode without having to open the whole right panel notifications section. Helpful for presentations and screen sharing.

You can also change the default directory where screenshots are stored, so they never end up on the desktop in the first place. I have mine set to ~/Pictures/screenshots

The functionality of menu extras hidden in /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras

Also, show files / packages on Logic Pro projects which are packed as a file.

Using the exposé command to show desktop grab a file from finder then pressing the exposé command to show all windows of the current application and dropping the file I grabbed from the finder into the desired window, saves me a TON of time in photoshop and other design apps, and for attachments in files. I custom map mine the way they were in 10.4 when tis feature was released, f11 desktop, f12 all windows, f13 current applications windows.

1. Accessibility > Zoom > "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom" > Ctrl

So you press "Ctrl" and then scroll down on the trackpad and it will zoom in anywhere/on anything. Use it quite often and love it :)

2. Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad options > Enable dragging > Without dragg lock

This one takes some time getting used to but it's awesome once you get the hang of it

3. Control–Shift–Power button

To put the display to sleep

Menu-bar search.

Press CMD + Shift + / to open a search over all Menubar-actions for the current app.

If you're used to action-search in IntelliJ or VSCode, this will feel familiar to you. It's for those countless features that you use often, but not often enough to remember their proper shortcuts.

There are Launchbar- and Alfred plugins that provide a nicer interface.

(Germans need to reconfigure the shortcut in the settings, because our keyboards are weird)

Drag and drop a file to the terminal to get its path.

Might be mentioned below but:

In the terminal you can use pbcopy and pbpaste to use your clipboard: cat my.txt | pbcopy.

In the terminal you can use the open command to open a file or a folder in finder: open . and open foo.pdf.

Double tap the window frame to maximize it correctly (not to a new screen and not just on one axis but the way Windows maximize works).

Multiple virtual desktops and swiping between them with gestures.

When typing with fancy characters: - Alt-command-space brings up a window where you can select arbitrary Unicode characters - Go to your keyboard settings in System Preferences and add the “Greek” keyboard. Then you can press ctrl-command-space to switch your keyboard and quickly type in Greek symbols (e.g. “a” becomes alpha). Press ctrl-command-space again to switch back.

Option-clicking the sound menubar item to adjust input/output devices, or option-clicking the wifi menu to see additional wifi info.

I usually have multiple Bash tabs open in Terminal, and I needed a quick way to see what each tab contained. The following bash script will set the Title of the tab.

  #!/bin/bash
  # Sets the title of the Terminal Window / Tab.
  # title foo => Sets the title of the Terminal Window / Tab to foo. 
  echo -n -e "\033]0;$1\007"

If you drag a window's corner, the adjoining edges resize. If you hold down Option while you do this, all four sizes resize about the center. Even better, you can press and release Option during a single drag to turn this behavior on and off incrementally, which means you can arbitrarily adjust a window with one drag (if you're persistent enough).

That, in terminal you can move cursor to any position in command by holding Option-key & clicking wherever you want.

You can create a screenshots folder and default all of the screenshots straight into it. That’s been a lifesaver for me.

I solved the screenshot on the desktop problem by using a program called Hazel. It can automatically move and sort files based on any number of criteria. I set it up to move all screenshots on my desktop to a ~/tmp directory. This has worked pretty well for keeping my desktop completely empty which is my preference.

You can change your MAC address. I always thought this was permanent. Regus (OG wework) offices have finicky WiFi and one day it refused to connect to my laptop. Eventually I googled how to change MAC address and there was an ifconfig command.

Suffice to say I had to change my MAC address every week to fight their shitty system.

Scroll with vim keys in Safari Reader Mode.

I didn't see this one anywhere. You can use modifier keys in combination with Hot Corners.

Go to [System Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners] and when you make your selection just press the modifier you'd like to use.

I've always found hot corners too easily triggered, for me this strikes the right balance.

I recently discovered the Bluetooth device debugging menu.

Hold Shift + Option and click on the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar.

You can do basic screensharing with Messages on macOS. Open Messages, select a message thread with an existing contact, then from the menu bar, select Buddies > Invite to Share My Screen (or Ask to Share Screen).

Doesn't work for groups (last time I tried at least), and hideously undiscoverable.

If you took a screenshot to your clipboard but want it saved as a file you can open preview and hit cmd N.

If you use spotlight and type in a word, you can press command + L, to jump to the dictionary definition

Some of these are amazing. I'm currently a Windows user mostly, I added the same thread but for windows here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099633

Cmd + ~ (tilde)

Cycles between the windows of the same app. Similar to cmd + tab.

Saved me so much when reading multiple pdfs in preview

If you’re in Terminal and want to open a Finder window with the current path, just type “open .”

I was about to reply that stacks is a new feature, but I googled it and found it's been a feature since 2007. I could have sworn it was announced a year or two ago. Anyone know if there was an improvement announced recently that I seem to be recalling?

Hold Option key while clicking to unlock all kinds of more detailed informtion and options

eg, Option-click the menubar wifi icon and you get all the details of your wifi connection including BSSID of the router you're actually connected to, RSSI, your assigned IP, etc.

command + space launches the spotlight search. In here, not only can you search, but you can also do some math to use it as a calculator. Real handy if I need to do a quick calculation. For example, entering in `243*2/4` will spit out `121.5`.

Open a pdf in preview. Select pages, press Copy, then Cmd + N.

You get a new PDF with the pages you copied.

You can add blank spaces on the dock using:

defaults write http://com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{tile-data={}; tile-type="spacer-tile";}'

Very useful for organizing icons.

Increase Finder window size by dragging (in home directory), then press Cmd + Shift + E to make Finder open new windows with the new size. Works until a reboot. Why? Because those stupid windows are too small by default.

So many nice things here - and nearly all of them missing from iOS/iPad OS!

Using the space bar to quickly look into the contents of any file: pdf, images, txt files.

And this works also within other apps like spark where I can use the space bar to quickly verify what attachements are present.

Don’t think windows does this.

You can write low level code to interject all keystrokes and program keys.

https://github.com/yqrashawn/GokuRakuJoudo

When Cmd+Tab'ing press and hold the Option key before letting go of Cmd to unminimize/create a window for the selected application (assuming it doesn't already have unminimized windows open).

Spaces. Including "Displays have separate Spaces". I kinda knew it was there all the time but never really used it until recently. It fits very nice with the Chrome "People" feature.

Emacs key bindings work in all standard text boxes and views. For example ctrl-A to go to the beginning of the line and ctrl-E to go to the end.

Also, damn you Microsoft for using non-standard views in your macOS apps.

I was able to use software that I installed without a problem for years, but now Gatekeeper makes installing software from outside of the Mac App Store a chore for little to no gain.

When typing or editing text, Option-arrow to move the cursor one word to the left or right

Command-arrow to move to the beginning or end of the line

Combine either of these with the shift key to quickly select text.

Is there a method to the modifier key "madness"? I'd like to form a mental model of when to use Shift vs Ctrl vs Option in various shortcuts being mentioned.

Option + Command + Spacebar opens a Finder search window. It is a fast way to open a new Finder window from anywhere in the system regardless of your currently active app.

Ctrl+Shift+Esc (hold) to force-quit a locked up fullscreen app.

How easy it is to move between various OS's now. I thought a mac user was mac user, but I think it is trivial for most users to swap to Linux and Windows now.

My favorite anti-feature is copying a screenshot from the desktop with cmd+c, then pasting into gimp gives a high resolution png of the mac mime-type icon for pngs.

In any native text field, try a few CTRL-hotkeys you'd type in Terminal:

CTRL + K (delete to end of line)

CTRL + D (delete in place aka delete key (not backspace))

CTRL + A (go to start of line)

CTRL + E (go to end of line)

[Ctrl] Right/Left arrows

as an alternative to 3 finger swipe, to move across multiple desktop spaces. Especially helpful when when you have multiple editors and layouts

double click the edge of a window to expand it to the edge of the screen. hold alt while double clicking to get the opposite edge to also expand.

My favorite feature is the help menu, where you can search the menu for a command. I'm not aware of any other OS doing this so consistently.

i posted mine yesterday[0], about being able to alt-tab between windows of all applications, not just between applications or tabs. i remapped that to opt-cmd-tab for easier access.

does anyone know how to turn off wifi on startup via scripting?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085803

Yeah... I haven't been using Stacks this whole time from 2006 until today. Thanks for the nudge. It really is an improvement.

Not macOS specific, but it took me too long to find out the tab key changed the focused text field in a web browser.

Hopefully I soon discover how to cut/paste files to move them... Surely there must be a way!

Dragging a file from Finder into the terminal will insert the absolute path of that file.

`pbcopy` and `pbpaste` for copying to / pasting from clipboard. Nice time savers!

⌘ + Down for dbl click to open ⌘ + [, ⌘ + ] to go back/forwards in finder history

Oh, press alt when minimising/maximising a window for an additional surprise.

To open a Finder window from the command line in the current folder type: open .

I find my mac periodically turns off its WiFi and starts spamming the airwaves on a private channel looking for partners in a protocol nothing else in the house depends on.

This makes servers running on the mac unreliable (sometimes it's not listening to the net) and adds interference to other devices.

I can do a PIP on Netflix by tapping in volume icon on the Safari search bar.

Control + two finger swipe/mouse wheel to smoothly zoom in and out.

⌘⇧/ — focuses current application help search field, this is gold

Going to the key above tab to switch windows within the same program

Here is mine: https://twitter.com/jdxcode/status/1268208784972951554?s=20

Install Alfred to replace spotlight, such a good utility.

shift-ctrl-command-4 to crop a section of the screen to the clipboard.

Then "File"->"New From Clipboard" in Preview to be able to save it as a file.

Control-shift+power key to turn display off immediately.

Cmd-` inside the Cmd-Tab modal cycles apps in reverse

Digital color meter to get colors from webpages.

Right click on Launchpad gives you a start menu.

tmutil and pbcopy (cli utilities)

cmd + k to clear the terminal

[cmd] `

open .

The picture-in-picture window can be precisely placed by holding down the Cmd key while dragging.

If a web site doesn't have a PiP button, press and hold the speaker icon.

Mine is not a core os feature but rather a 3rd party add on. A window manager with keyboard shortcuts. Life changing and perplexing it's not the default that ships with the os.