Iāve just started and Iām really looking forward to this (whether or not I end up with some new skills).
Currently, I feel like Keyboard Maestro and Preview are the two tools that really make my Mac much nicer to use than my work Windows machine.
(Thereās loads of other stuff too, but these are key).
1) Copy App Icons Even Easier/Faster
@ismh86 and others - you can get an app icon even easier than the iDownloadBlog article suggests. That might have been the way to do it in 2014, but itās definitely easier now
- select the app in Finder
- press āC
- go to Preview.app
- File > New From Clipboard.
VoilĆ !
You donāt need to use āGet Infoā at all.
2) Get Your Proxy Icons Back
In Monterey, you can get your proxy icons back easily!
Go to System Preferences Ā» Accessibility Ā» Display and check the box next to āShow window title iconsā as shown below:
3) Revive āSave As!ā Banish āDuplicate!ā
I wrote about this one a long time ago but I re-post it every few years because it seems so easily forgotten or missed or āI didnāt know that!ā
āSave Asā Isnāt Gone, Itās Just Hidden
Longtime Mac users know that āSave Asā was ā§āS but Apple changed that in Lion to āDuplicateā which no one asked for, and Iāve never met anyone who likes it.
However, if you click on the āFileā menu and hold down the Option key, āSave Asā¦ā will reappear! Or you can just press ā„āS to use āSave Asā¦ā!
But what we really want is to have āSave Asā¦ā restored to its rightful place.
Even better, weād like to banish āDuplicateā to never be seen again.
We can do this. We have the technology.
Get Save Asā¦ Back
First, go to System Preferences Ā» Keyboard Ā» App Shortcuts.
Then. click the + button as shown here:
Set "Application to āAll Applicationsā
Enter āSave Asā¦ā as the āMenu Titleā
Use ā§āS as the Keyboard Shortcut, like so:
Click āAddā
Banish āDuplicateā
If you just do the above step, āDuplicateā will appear in the āFileā menu under āSave Asā¦ā
If thatās what you want, stop reading.
However, if you never use āDuplicateā and want to get rid of it, repeat the same process as above, but this time set the āMenu Titleā to āDuplicateā and the Keyboard Shortcut to ā„āS like this:
Now when you go to the āFileā menu, you will see āSave Asā but you wonāt see āDuplicateā unless you hold down Option.
VoilĆ Again!
Text boxes werenāt always placed in the center of the document. I canāt remember when it changed, but I do remember the change because it was pretty frustrating. The text box used to go wherever the cursor was clicked and could be drawn to whatever size was needed.
I use the āNew from clipboardā command all the time, so much so it is a merry confluence between KM and Preview. I have it set so that Hyperkey+P attempts to create a new document in Preview with the clipboard contents.
My most common use case is that I have taken a screenshot. I always have the screenshot set to go to the clipboard, so I donāt ever change those settings making life simpler there, then if I want it in Preview I simply tap Hyperkey+P to get it. If I just want to save the screenshot, which is uncommon for me, I put it in Preview then save it somewhere.
Awesome post, thanks
Preview does have a redact option, it was added in Big Sur apparently.
Itās the third icon from the left when you are in the editing tools, and it works to redact by selecting text or you can draw a rectangle.
Here is the Apple support article.
āNew from clipboardā sounds like a great idea, but my menu item is greyed out. Any suggestions? (monterey, M1 macbook air)
Whatās on your clipboard?
Going from a screenshot should work, or CMD-C a png in finder.
Same happened to me. I got it to work by relaunching Preview, then did a test copy of part of an image within Preview. At this point New from Clipboard was no longer greyed out. Once that worked I went back to the copying of icons stuff and it worked.
New from Clipboard is always greyed out when there isnāt something suitable on the clipboard, but no idea why it was misbehaving like that in the fist place. For me at least the problem wasnāt permanent.
Great idea! I didnāt realize you could override an existing shortcut and the way it appears in the menu in this way.
I use the āN
shortcut for this. Super handy to send screenshots to Preview, for example.
I appreciate getting the proxy icons back (just upgraded to Monterey yesterday!). But you will have to mark me down as one person who uses Duplicate and understands the paradigm. Apple did a poor job of promoting when they introduced it in Lion, and it wasnāt fully adopted by third-party apps. This was just one of several changes made including Auto-save and Resume, Versions, and document locking (since dropped).
If you want both, you can reassign the Save As shortcut to command shift S and keep Duplicate too - if you assign it to anything other than option command S it will stay at the top level.
FWIW.
Had reason to find out recently that Preview has a handy Redact tool which is destructive and worked super well for my usecase
Stephen is looking for an easy way to strip location data from images. Iāve used this with no probs for a few years (though it doesnāt do HEIC images): ImageOptim ā better Save for Web
āClose and Deleteā currently open file in Preview
This thread also made me realize that I have a Keyboard Maestro macro to delete the current file in Preview which you can download from Dropbox from that link.
This is handy when Iām done with a file, usually an image that Iāve downloaded, and then decide that I no longer need it. I hope @MacSparky will like it since it combines AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro
(The name āClose & Deleteā comes from BBEdit which has a similar feature for text files.)
Itās fairly simple, 3 steps:
- Get the name/path of the file
try
tell document 1 of application "Preview"
set f to path
end tell
end try
return f
- Show the user a prompt that includes the file name:
- If the user selects āMove to Trashā then do this
try
tell document 1 of application "Preview"
set f to path
close
end tell
POSIX file f
tell application "Finder" to move result to trash
end try
Hereās what it looks like in Keyboard Maestro:
Thatās a simple solution I never thought ofā¦I am starting to get more into applescript and shell scripts for KM though. Thanks for sharing this.
I used to have a need to open the current Preview pdf in a different app, e.g., PDF Expert.
I can see now that TJās script could easily be adapted to do that task, so I have adapted it with this little script:
try
tell document 1 of application "Preview"
set f to path
close
end tell
tell application "Pixelmator Pro" to open f
end try
Using an IF statement, my version now opens the current file in PDF Expert if it is a PDF, or attempts to open it in Pixelmator Pro if itās not.
Oh, Yeah - Thanks so much for this - I didnāt even think about it, but I did miss Save As - and this does the trick. I owe you a coffee!!
Legend! I could recall there was a fix for this having did it a few OSās ago but i could not recall the steps.
Thank you so much.
Can run Accessibility tests and set alt text on PDFs in Preview? I work at a university so all our documentation has to be compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Acrobat is sort of a nightmare for this.