10 macOS System Settings You May Want To Change

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some system settings on your Mac that you may want to change. 

So in general I like to use my Mac with System Settings set as close to default as I can. I do customize a few things and I can see the value in customizing others. For instance, you can change the action that takes place when you double click on the Title Bar of a window. Here I have a Finder window and obviously there are buttons here. If I were to click where there are buttons those buttons would activate. But, there are areas where there are no buttons like to the right of the title here, to the right of the green dot. These are places where you can click and drag the window. You could also double click to perform an action. You can customize that in System Settings. 

Let's go into System Settings here and you'll find this in Desktop & Dock. You can see it right here. Window, Title Bar, double click Action. Fill will take the window to its largest size usually filling the entire screen, but it is still a window. It's not going into Full Screen mode or anything like that. There will be other windows behind it. Zoom is similar but it will use the apps preference for what the largest window should be. Minimize will minimize the window into the Dock. You can also set it to No Action if you find you accidentally double click the Title Bar and it triggers one of these and you'd just rather have it not do anything. 

Next I want to point out another setting that's here in Desktop & Dock. It's Automatically Hide & Show the Dock. Notice the Dock isn't at the bottom of the screen. But it will be there if I move my pointer to the bottom. It pops right up. To me this makes sense since the only way I can actually use the Dock is by moving the pointer there in the first place. With it hidden it is not visually taking up screen space nor is it being distracting by being a row of icons there at the bottom. But you can turn this Off and then the Dock will always be there which can be helpful because you can see badges, those little red numbers that can indicate that there's a notification for that app. You can also see which apps are running and it makes it easier to Drag & Drop to the app. 

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Now another setting peeking out just below here is this Click Wallpaper to Show Desktop. So, you have two choices here, Always or Only in Stage Manager. I find it having it on Always is annoying. If you click on the Desktop like this everything clears away so you can get to items on the Desktop. You can press the Escape Key or you can simply click again to return all the windows. However, I commonly click on the Desktop to make the finder the frontmost window. To do that you're going to need to switch it this to Only in Stage Manager, essentially turning it off unless you're using Stage Manager. Now I can click on the Desktop. Notice when I do that the frontmost app goes from System Settings to Finder. So now I can access Keyboard Shortcuts for things like a New Finder Window. Also note you can have items shown on the Desktop with this checkbox here. So, for instance, let's say I had some files here on the Desktop like this. If I uncheck this then the Desktop looks empty. If I go to create a New Finder Window and I go to my Desktop folder I can see those items. So the Desktop Folder, it's still just there as a regular normal folder. You'll just no longer see these items on the Desktop, which can be useful especially if you do a lot of online meetings where you're sharing your screen. But note turning this Off also has the side effect that you can no longer click on the Desktop to get to the Finder, like I was showing.

Now normally when you're working with an app, like here in Numbers, if you quit the app without closing the document and then launch the app again it simply reopens all the current windows with all the current documents. This is normal behavior and it's really useful. It allows you to easily quit an app and resume where you left off. However, if you don't like that there's a System Setting for it that is also in the Desktop & Dock settings. You want to scroll down to Windows and here you can turn on Close Windows When Quitting an Application, like that. So now with that turned on I can quit Numbers and now when I relaunch Numbers the next time that window with that document doesn't open again. I'm on the Open New Document dialogue here. So essentially then Quitting closes all document on Windows and then quits. 

Whichever you choose you can do the opposite by going to the Menu with Quit and holding the Option Key. So right now it says Quit Numbers. If I hold the Option Key it says Quit and Keep Windows. 

Now often I hear from people that when they drag windows around sometimes the window inexplicably just fills the screen. I think what's happening in a lot of those cases is people are dragging and their pointer is going up into the Menu Bar. So when you do that normally it does this action where it acts like it's using Window Fill, like that. So you can turn that Off by going into System Settings and then to Desktop & Dock. Then go down to Windows here. You can see the setting for Drag Windows to Menu Bar to Fill The Screen. There's another one here, Drag Window to Left or Right Edge of the Screen to Tile. So you may want to turn that Off too if you're accidentally triggering it. You can still go to the Window Menu and use Fill and then Move & Resize Options here to do it. You can also use Hold Option Key While Dragging Windows to Tile to do both of those. But this will prevent you from accidentally triggering these two options. 

There's also another option down here, Under Mission Control. Drag Windows to the Top of the Screen. So above the Menu Bar to enter Mission Control. So with that On, if you drag all the way to the top you can see it now goes into Mission Control. If you find you accidentally trigger that you may want to turn that Option off as well. 

Now let's talk about some settings that are not in Desktop & Dock. If you go into the General Section here and you go to Storage you're going to get lots of information about your storage on your Mac and you may see this one, Empty Trash Automatically. You can click here to turn it On. What this will do is that any file that goes into the Trash will remain there for 30 days and then automatically gets deleted. It won't empty the entire trash, just the files as they reach that 30 day mark. Once you turn this On here it's going to disappear from this section. You'll see the little checkmark there but the next time you come here it won't be there. So if you don't see it, it means you probably already have it On. You can check by going to the Finder and then going to Settings in the Finder and then under Advanced it's a Checkbox right here. 

Since the Trash is only a safety net and you shouldn't treat it as a temporary holding place for files you should only be putting files in there if you're sure you want to Delete them. The 30 days gives you that safety net but then you don't get stuck, say, after 6 months or a year having a ton of files taking up space simply because you forgot to go and empty the Trash. 

Now one of the problems that we've all got as computer and device users today is all the Notifications sent by all the different apps. So, of course, you can go into System Settings and go to Notifications and you can change for each app exactly how you are notified. But there is another setting in another location. If you go to General and then go to AirDrop & Continuity here's where you'll find a setting here for Notifications & Live Activities from your iPhone. So you may find that since you connected your iPhone to your Mac for use for Mirroring and other things that now you get tons of Notifications on your Mac that are coming from iPhone Apps. This is where you can turn Off Allow Notifications from iPhone and Allow Live Activities from iPhone. So if you'd rather just keep those on your iPhone and not have them also on your Mac switch these Off. 

Now one setting that I think people don't use often enough is Displays and then changing the Display Resolution. You'll see that here as a group of usually five different settings, including the default in the middle. It's perfectly okay to change this occasionally. A lot of people treat this as you set it and then you never change it. But if you happen to be working on a project where the app you're using or the article you're reading the text is really small, maybe change it for larger text. If you're using an app that has tons of controls and you want to be able to fit it all on the screen then go to More Space. Don't be afraid to change this occasionally. Even changing it for an hour and then changing it back.

But what I want to show you is that you have a lot more options than just the ones you see here. If you scroll down to the bottom and go to Advanced there's an option here for Show Resolution As List. Turn that On and now you'll see a List of Resolutions that your Display supports. So, you've got a lot more choices here some of which may be better for a specific situation than just the ones that were shown in the previous interface. Plus, you can also select Show All Resolutions and get an even larger List. This usually includes a lot of the low resolution examples which you wouldn't want to use normally but in some situations, like with screen recording or presenting online, they may be useful. When we go to the Keyboard Settings, down here, we usually focus on things like Keyboard Shortcuts, Text Replacement, the input sources, and all of that. But another setting here, Keyboard Navigation, is if you have that turned Off then you go to a standard dialogue like, for instance, here in Pages we are at the Open File Dialogue. If I use the Tab Key it will go to the left sidebar. It'll go to Search and then nowhere because the Open button isn't active yet, and then back. Basically just these places. But if you turn on Keyboard Navigation and then in the same dialogue you'll see that Tabbing takes you many more places. It takes you through all the buttons at the top over to the Search Field, to the New Document Button at the bottom. As a matter of fact if you go to some sections, like the left sidebar, you can use the Arrow Keys. You can go to the area here that has all the files and use the Arrow Keys to go through that. So, you have a lot more options for using the keyboard to get what you want by playing around with the tab and arrow keys and then Return or Spacebar to trigger something. 

I prefer to have Keyboard Navigation turned On for this reason. It also makes it easier to automate things using apps like Keyboard Maestro. 

One last one I want to show you is for people that use a trackpad which would be all the MacBook users and lot of iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Studio users as well, so a majority of the Mac users. If you go to the trackpad here there is an option for Tap to Click. With that off, you actually have to press down on the trackpad in order for it to register a click. But with it turned On you can just barely tap the trackpad, as long it is not a drag gesture or something like that, it's going to act like a click. This is quieter and easier to do. It also even works on a MacBook Neo which has a mechanical trackpad. You would think tap to click didn't work there but by turning this On it actually takes away most of the disadvantage of having a mechanical trackpad. So, of course, there are tons of other settings in System Settings to explore. I just thought these were some that were worth mentioning here. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.