I’m trying to remotely diagnose a problem with a relative’s email setup. My Mac and their Mac are both using Mojave, however their computer does not have screen sharing enabled. When trying to unlock the padlock to enable screen sharing, the relative is doing something wrong with the password. From past experience, this is to do with use of caps lock and shift. It would be SO easy to diagnose this if there was a way to unhide the password characters. Is this possible?
We spent a while on facetime via an iPad that was being held up to see the computer screen, but this was also very inconvenient and ultimately did not help.
No, you can’t unhide the characters, but what you can do is:
- Create a new text document in TextEdit
- Type the password in the new document
- Cut/Copy the password from TextEdit
- When the password field comes up in System Preferences, have them
control+clickin the password field and then choose “Paste”. - Then click ‘Unlock’
Like so:
We tried this (using sticky notes but same thing) and it worked with one of the passwords but not the other. Typically just typing the password in the clear is enough to show what’s going wrong with the shift key, caps lock etc.
I just set up a test standard account to verify that the issue is the account in question didn’t have admin rights. Mac OS doesn’t say “this account doesn’t have admin rights” it just shakes the password window like you mistyped the password.