10 Hidden Commands and Features On Your Mac

Here's a list of 10 features of your Mac that are hidden from view. You'll learn about hidden folders and files, hidden Safari menus, how to access hidden markup tools in Mail and Photos, hidden toolbar buttons, hidden menu commands and even characters hidden in your keyboard.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you ten hidden things on your Mac. 
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Some of the most useful features of macOS are hidden from view and hard to find. When I think about hidden things on your Mac one of the first thing I think about is the user library folder. There's a lot of important stuff in your library folder and typically you don't need to get to it. But when you do you can't find it. If you go to Go and then your Home folder the library folder isn't there. But it is there! It's hidden. Now there are several ways to get to it. But I think the best way for most people to remember to get to it is you could use the Go menu and then Library. It's still not there. It's hidden even in the Go menu.But if you hold the Option key down it appears and you can go to it. You can see here it was there all the time in your Home folder, just hidden. So if you ever need to go to your Library folder that's the best way to get there. 
What about hidden files? There's actually a whole bunch of hidden files on your Mac in all sorts of different locations. Now most of the time you don't need to see these. But if you want to see all the files somewhere the easy way to do it is to use the keyboard Command Command Shift and then Period. It shows them all. You can see I've got a bunch of hidden files here in my User folder including that Library file. Notice hidden files appear as gray. To get rid of them and go back to normal just use Command Shift Period again.
You know what's really handy in Safari especially if you're a developer is the Develop Menu in Safari. See it right here. No you don't because it's hidden. You can reveal it easily by going to  Safari Preferences Advanced then click Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar. Then you get all these extra commands including the ability to inspect things, disable various kinds of things. Most of this is useful for developers but you have other commands here that even non-developers can use like Empty Caches. But there's even another hidden menu in Safari, right. A second hidden menu that's the Debug Menu. To get to that you're going to need to run Terminal. Then use this command to enable the Debug Menu. Now I have to Quit Safari and then launch it again and now you'll see a Debug Menu appear. Now this is even more obscure stuff. Most people would never use this but it's interesting to know it's there.
Now you don't have to use Terminal commands to reveal hidden things in the Menu Bar. All you need is the Option key. For instance in the Finder here, if I choose File, I'll see all these different commands. But there are hidden ones you're not seeing. If I hole the Option key down you could see them appear. They replace ones that are there. So for instance Open changes to Open a New Window and Close. Open With changes to Always Open With. Other things here like QuickLook changes to Slideshow. Move to Trash changes to Delete Immediately. 
If you want to find more hidden things go into your favorite apps and simply go through the menus and hold the Option key down to reveal different things. The same is true for these menu bar icons here. Some of them reveal more things if you hold the Option key down. Here's Bluetooth, for instance, but hold the Option key down and click Bluetooth I get a lot more. For these often you have to hold the Option key first and then click. If you click first and then hold the Option key down it doesn't change.
Now another major source of hidden things is the Context menu. The Context menu is what you get when you either Control click or two finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse and you get the Context menu comes up. There are all sorts of different commands in here. It's called the Context menu because what shows up depends on the context. For instance for a file that's what I get. For a folder this is what I get. For a blank space here in the Finder this is what I get. For the Desktop I get something else. Even the Dock shows things. So for instance I can hold the Control key down, click on a Dock item, and I'll get Commands here. It depends on what type of item I'm looking at. The Finder gives me a whole bunch of different things. Most apps will give you a list of recent documents. System Preferences, if you put it in the Dock and you Control click that actually gives you a list of all the different parts in System Preferences and you can go right to one. Note that you don't need to Control click or two finger click on the items in the Dock for those. You can simply click and hold and they will appear as well.
Note that you can Control click or click and hold things in the Title Bar to find things as well. I can click on the Title here and hold and I get this little interface here where I can rename the file, apply tags, and even change the location of the file. Move it while it's open. If I hold the Command key or the Control key and click on the little icon for the file in the Title Bar I can actually go up a level. So I can go up a level right there and it will open up the Finder window for that level of files and folders. 
While we're talking about the Tool Bar here, see all these button that you get at the top of Pages and just about every app that has a toolbar you can customize these. So you can go to View and then look for Customize Toolbar. It appears in different places in different apps but it's always under View. You can also Control click on the Toolbar in a blank space and choose Customize Toolbar. Then it brings up all these buttons that are hidden. These are buttons that you can add to the Toolbar by just dragging them up there and adding them in. You can also remove some. You can also drag this set up here to reset it to the defaults. Pages in particular has a lot of cool buttons. Some other apps really don't have much besides the default.
One place where you can reveal lots of hidden things is in the Finder if you go to Finder Preferences. First off under General you have Show These Items on the Desktop. So I can reveal hard drives for instance on the Desktop. External disks, Optical media. connected servers. I can have that appear on the Desktop. Also under Sidebar I can control what's in the Finder Sidebar here. So I can say Remove the Movie folder or add it again if I've removed it and want it back. While we're talking about the Finder Sidebar notice that everyone of these categories here if you move the cursor over it you'll see a Hide button and you can click that to hide the whole category. Click it again to Show it. This hides things for a lot of people. For instance I'll get people asking me hey where did all my iCloud stuff go. It used to be in the sidebar. If you don't move your cursor over there to look it looks like it's just gone. Only if you move your cursor over there is the hidden Show and Hide button there. You can click it to unhide that stuff and reveal it.
Also in the Finder there's a whole hidden set of preferences that you won't find in Finder Preferences. That's because they're under View, Show View Options or Command J. This brings up some different options that you've got like changing the size of the text for instance, or whether or not icons are shown here in this view and other things. What makes this doubly hidden is you could adjust these as much as you want but they only apply to the current type of view. So, for instance, if I switched to List View all this changes. There's a different set of settings. Icon View has a different set of settings as well. So even if you think you know it really well from using Column View you may want to check it out in the other views to see what hidden settings they are there.
Another placer where things are often hidden is when you go to Save a file. So here I am in TextEdit. I'll do File, Save and you may wonder how you choose a location for a file. You can create a name, you can add Tags, and you can choose where and choose some places here. But where is the interface that allows you to pick any place on your drive. Well, you need to click this button here in order to reveal all all that. That expands this window. Now it's not always a button that looks like this. A similar place where you find this is if you go to Print. If you go to Print you may see a really simple Print dialogue here but there's a Show Details button. So sometimes it's that little down arrow. Sometimes it's that Show/Hide Details button.
It's the same here in Pages. This may be how you get the Save dialogue at first but then click here to expand it. When you go to Print you also get a Show Details, Hide Details button that you can switch between.
Now it maybe weird to say that there are keys hidden in your keyboard, right. It's actually a piece of hardware. It can't hide anything. But there are hidden characters that you can get to by using the keyboard. So, for instance, I can type something like this and if I want to have an accent mark instead of just tapping the e key on the keyboard, tap and hold down the e key and this reveals all the different accent marks. I can click it with my mouse or simply hit the number underneath it to have that accent mark. Likewise if I want to use all sorts of special characters or emoji I can do Control Command Space and it brings up the little special character emoji viewer here. I can search at the top. I can scroll through them. 
I also think of the Markup Tools which I think of hidden features because you can be in and out like Preview here and not see that many tools at the top. But click the simple Markup Tool here and it reveals an entire second toolbar with all of these different tools that you can use for all sorts of things. Now if you think Markup really isn't that hidden when it comes to Preview it is a little more hidden when it comes to other apps. For instance here I'm in Mail and I've attached an image to this message I'm going to send. But notice if I move my cursor over it I get this little button here. Click that and you have the ability to go in and use Markup on this image. It's all the same tools.  Here in Photos you've got the Markup tool as well. Where is it hidden. Well if you go into a Photo and click Edit. Then click these three dots here. You'll see all the different extensions you've got for editing. Markup is there by default and you now have those markup tools in here to be able to markup a photo.
This isn't even a complete list. There are other hidden things. Some things hidden by default. Other things that you can hide and then not remember how to get back. There are terminal commands to enable different hidden settings. If you use something that's hidden in macOS that you find useful but I didn't mention here mention it below in Comments.

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 Hidden Commands and Features On Your Mac”

Markus Alexander

5 years ago

Wow, Gary, thanks for these tips. I've been using Macs for quite a while but there were still some gems here that I wasn't aware of. Another thing I like, although it isn't really hidden, is the options available in the Print menu if you click the dropdown arrow at the bottom left. From there, you can save virtually anything as a PDF or choose from a variety of "send" options.

Gina Ferrari

Wonderful stuff, Gary. In the future, please write out any terminal commands in the text that appears below your videos so we can cut and paste them, since getting those Terminal commands exact is most important.

Rocky

Probably the most remedial hide command is the Hide App command of command+H to hide the current application. Or option+command+h to hide all other opened applications except the one that's front most and active. I am often the Apple tech guy for friends and it is ubiquitous as to how many don't know or don't use this simple command enough to reduce screen clutter.

Comments Closed.

10 Hidden Commands and Features On Your Mac

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 Hidden Commands and Features On Your Mac”

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