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macOS Tidbits
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macos-tidbits.md

Clarus the dogcow macOS Tidbits

Some neat conveniences for macOS users (or just the macOS-curious).

When ⌘↹-ing between apps, you can mouse over over an app and release ⌘ to switch to that app without having to spam ↹ or ⇧↹.

⌥⌘-click an app in the Dock to switch to that app and hide all other apps at the same time. This is great when screen sharing.

Hold ⌘ to interact with background windows without bringing them into focus.

When using the mouse to select text, double-click to select a words. Triple-click to select a paragraph.

Relatedly, double-click and drag to select word-by-word. Triple-click and drag to select paragraph-by-paragraph.

When taking screenshots, hold ⌃ to copy the image instead saving it to your desktop.

Relatedly, you can make screenshots save somewhere else.

When using ⇧⌘4 to take screenshots, press Space to take screenshots of windows. In this mode, you can also:

  • hold ⌥ to take the window screenshot sans-shadow; and/or
  • hold ⌘ to capture child views within a window—such as open/save dialogues, alert windows, et al.

Relatedly, you can make shadowless default for window screenshots. Hold ⌥ to add the shadow.

⌘-drag to reorder icons in the Menu Bar.

Click and hold the Spotlight button in the Menu Bar to reset its location on screen.

Hold ⇧⌥ to adjust brightness or volume in quarter-increments. This is useful when the lowest click is still too bright or loud.

A quick way to access your Displays settings is to hold ⌥, and press either Brightness Up or Brightness Down. Same goes for Sound settings (⌥Volume Up, ⌥Volume Down, ⌥Mute) and Keyboard settings (⌥Keyboard Brightness Up, ⌥Keyboard Brightness Down). This still works if you have a Touch Bar: hold ⌥ and tap the corresponding button in the Control Strip.

When using drag & drop to copy/move a file, you can hold ⌘ to force Finder to move the file, or hold ⌥ to force Finder to copy the file. (Yes, you can ⌥-drag to duplicate a file within a single folder.)1

In Finder, hold ⌥ to Get Info on all selected items in one Info window, rather than in a barrage of individual windows. This also works with the keyboard shortcut, ⌥⌘I instead of ⌘I.

In any Save sheet, drag and drop a folder onto the sheet to navigate there in the Save sheet. Drag and drop a file to navigate there and prepopulate the “Save As” field with its filename.

You can change the icon of any Finder item: Copy any image or .icns file2, Get Info on any item in Finder, click to select the icon in the top left, and paste! Or simply drag & drop and image or .icns onto the icon.

Relatedly, you can even copy the icon from one file’s Info panel to paste into another.

Also relatedly, a bunch of the system icons live in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/.

⌘-click items in the Dock to reveal them in Finder.

Don’t want to accidentally add/remove apps from your Dock? Lock its contents by running:

defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true && killall Dock

Set it back to normal with:

defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool false && killall Dock

When macOS says you’ve spelled something wrong, and you right click then choose Learn Spelling, it just adds the word to the ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary file. If you’ve added a word to your dictionary that you no longer want, just open up the file and delete the word.

Relatedly, ⇧⌘G in any Finder window to paste to go straight to the right folder.

Drag and drop a folder onto the Terminal icon to open a terminal directly to that directory.3

Relatedly, ⌘-drag a folder onto a Terminal window to cd there without typing anything.4

Test your network capacity without any third party things (like speedtest.net or fast.com) by running networkQuality from the command line. For example:

> networkQuality
==== SUMMARY ====
Uplink capacity: 19.275 Mbps
Downlink capacity: 429.436 Mbps
Responsiveness: Medium (181.818 milliseconds | 330 RPM)
Idle Latency: 26.312 milliseconds | 2307 RPM

Footnotes

  1. By default, macOS will move the file if you’re dragging within the same drive. If you drag to a Finder location that’s on a different drive, Finder will copy by default. This is when these modifiers come in handy. ↩

  2. .icns is the Apple Icon Image format, which is used for icons macOS-wide. It’s basically just a container of an icon at different sizes. Why not just scale one image? Designers can use optical sizing to optimise the “same” icon for display at different sizes. ↩

  3. This is just a special case of dragging and dropping a file (or folder) onto any app icon to open it in that app. ↩

  4. This also works in iTerm. Though Terminal is a perfectly adequte terminal emulator, if you'd like a few more bells and whistles, iTerm is worth looking at. As is Warp, but as of February 2024, Warp doesn’t support this ⌘-drag shortcut. Criminal. ↩

@JamesNZL
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