Instead of falling into a weird clickbaity video with 100 small tips most of which you may know from previous same named videos form other YouTube, I thought it would be nice to start a thread here so we can all add our own tricks.
I’ll start with a small trick for Safari in its Reader Mode:
While it’s widely known that you can toggle Reader Mode on an article via the ⌘⇧R shortcut, it’s less known that you can scroll one paragraph at a time using the J and K keys that will scroll one paragraph up or down, respectivelly.
Great tip, @ldebritto! It’s worth noting that using ⇧⌘R to go in and out of Reader Mode and pressing J and K to scroll by paragraph while in Reader Mode also works on an iPad with a hardware keyboard.
I set a modifier key for hot corners. So nothing happens when I hit the corners unless I’m holding the ⌘ key. Exception is my upper left corner which I have set to disable screensaver, so I can keep my computer awake on demand.
One thing I use all the time, and have for a decade or two, but which is pretty unintuitive if you don’t happen to discover it:
If you have a ‘File Open…’ or ‘File Save As…’ dialog, or something similar, which is pointing at the wrong directory for you, you can drag a file or a directory into it, which will cause it to change to that directory or file (and select it if appropriate).
I often have a folder open in the Finder and want to save something to that particular folder… but navigating there using the dialog would be tedious, so this is very handy.
Of course, as the original poster pointed out, you could also find this and various other things in my YouTube video of small Mac Tips and Tricks.
As a sidenote, I have been setting up an Android device this week (more of that in another thread at some point ) and I’m realising how much I take Apple’s good software design for granted.
I guess my favourite trick is one lots of people probably know already, which is setting up CMD P P to print to PDF. So useful if you print to PDF a lot.
I’ve also made sure focus modes are always visible on the menu bar, and moved it next to the control centre. This isn’t a trick, it’s a hack because I can’t find a way to close Mac Message notifications when you don’t want them. Having focus modes in the menu bar means if you’re in a video meeting and your notifications are annoying you, it takes 2 clicks to switch on ‘do not disturb’ and silence everything immediately across all devices.
That is a great one I also use all the time. I’ll add that you can search for that folder with Alfred or Spotlight and drag and drop it into the dialog.
Yet another bonus for people who truly prefer not using a mouse on these dialogs: if you don’t mind writing the path (or at least a few characters of it) you can use the ⌘⇧G shortcut to enter the folder name and move straight there. If for some reason the desired folder doesn’t show up, you can follow the path there and use the tab key to choose between the subfolders.
As an example, I’ve triggered the ⌘⇧G shortcut on the save dialog, typed app, then hit tab, so it autocompleted and opened the options for navigating to its subfolders. Then I could use the arrows and just hit tab so it will show me the following subfolders for that folder.
How about navigating in Finder with only your keyboard? My preferred view is list view and within this I can go most places with ease with only a handful of keys.
↓↑ traverse the list
⌥↓ go to the bottom of the list
⌥↑ go to the top of the list
→ expand a folder
← collapse a folder, if on a folder, or return to the containing folder if on a file, thus…
←← collapse the folder you are in the middle of
[Enter] to edit the file/folder name
⌘↓ to open/launch a file or ‘open’ a folder (not expand, but go into)
⌘↑ close a folder (go up a level)
[Space] the best one of all — Quicklook any file
Many/most of these likely work in other Finder views as well.
For those of you who use terminal, you can use touchID in terminal.
In your favorite terminal run these commands:
sudo cp /etc/pam.d/sudo_local.template /etc/pam.d/sudo_local
sudo vim /etc/pam.d/sudo_local
(Or use nano or whatever editor that you like.)
Uncomment the last line of the file by removing the # from the start of the line.
# sudo_local: local config file which survives system update and is included for sudo
# uncomment following line to enable Touch ID for sudo
auth sufficient pam_tid.so
If you want to used touchid in iTerm, you need to also make one change to your preferences:
Prefs -> Advanced -> Allow sessions to survive logging out and back in
Set the value to `no’.
The only problem with this is your change will not persist OS updates. However, if you go to the link below and read through the comments, you can create an alias to automate this with the sed command.
This is an awesome tip and I have no idea that this is possible. It’s one of the reasons I use Default Folder X and now you are saying that there’s a OS-level capability to do the same. Thank you!
Edit: the mere thought of dropping a file or folder into the File-Save As dialog box is kinda scary - feels like you are moving the file or folder. I still do have that feeling even after trying out this trick!
This is perhaps more of a fun Alfred trick, but I’m going to share it anyway in case it prompts ideas for non-Alfred users too.
You can set up shortcuts for pretty much anything in Alfred using the workflows functionality. For example, I have a PDF document in my file system I usually have to refer to once every couple of weeks. Instead of navigating to it each time, I’ve set up a workflow so I can trigger Alfred and type my keyword to open it. Likewise, I have a plain text/markdown file I need once every couple of weeks (it has some key info in it I often need to refer to), and I have a shortcut for that too. I even have it for a colour chart jpg I need once every couple of months so that I can quickly pull out the html colour codes I need. You can do it for anything!
You can also do this for websites, so if you have a specific site you need a lot, instead of opening your browser you can just set up a workflow that opens the site when you type in your keyword. For example, I have this for a couple of specific pages in my employer’s wiki that I often need to access.
It’s such a simple thing to do but really eliminates annoying little repetitive actions.
This is so true! You can even tie them to special hotkeys if you need so. For instance, I’ve mapped hyper+Y to open YNAB website.
keywords seem to be preferable when linking to specific files, though. Whenever I’m on a long project, I keep a shortcut to the text file that collects ideas related to it, so I can quick collect those random thoughts I get when I’m doing other things.
Does anyone know why this is required and what I should notice when changing this?
I have been using Jason Snell’s instructions (from before there was a template) and Touch ID for sudo has been working fine with this setting set to (the default) “yes”.
⌘ ⌥ H to hide all applications except the foremost one. This lets me clear the clutter in the desktop immediately and focus on the foremost app.
I also adopted someone’s KM macro that will also minimize (not hide, unfortunately) all open windows of that foremost app using ⌃ ⌥ H so I can focus on the opened window. It’s 2 key strokes but it does help getting the clutter out of the way.
I’m going to piggyback on a few of the ideas shared already and point out that using QuickLook in a ‘File Open’ or ‘Save’ dialog is great. It’s especially helpful when uploading or attaching a file to something, just to select it and press the Space bar to make sure it’s the one I want.
I wonder, whether I can configure it to press Shift, instead of Space bar. My muscle memory from using Alfred is that Shift will let me Quick Look any selected result in Alfred.
Yet another thing that came to mind: natively pressing ⌘+? allows to search menus and pressing Enter will activate the selected entry.
While I still use an Alfred workflow for that, sometimes I resort to the native route as some menu items won’t show up in Alfred (nor Paletro for that matter), namely Things Convert to Project…
Depending on the keyboard layout, some users will have to use ⇧ ⌘ / to access help in the menu bar.
You can use the Space Bar as well as the Enter key to activate a selected entry.
Once the Help menu is activated, you can use the arrow key to scroll down and select an item with Enter or Space instead of using the displayed keyboard shortcut. You can also use the left and right arrow keys to navigate to a menu.
) and I’m realising how much I take Apple’s good software design for granted.