15 Obscure System Preferences You Should Know About

Here are some System Preference settings you may not know about or be using. Learn how to change the menu bar clock, customize your language by app, show a message on the lock screen, access hidden screen resolutions and more.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at some obscure System Preference settings that you should know about.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 900 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
So System Preferences is filled with different settings for your Mac. Some of them we access all the time and you probably know about them. But there are so many! There are some more obscure ones that you may not know about that are still pretty useful. So let's go into System Preferences and start right here at the top with your Apple ID settings. Now you probably looking right away here at your iCloud Settings. But if you switch to Name, Phone, Email then you'll see information here about you and here you've got three checkboxes and this controls what marketing email you get from Apple. So if you're getting too much email from Apple all the time about new things you can turn these off. Of if you're not getting them at all and you'd like to you can turn them on. 
Next you've got this clock here at the upper right hand corner of your screen. But how do you control exactly what's shown there. In previous version of macOS this was under Date & Time. But now, in Big Sur, you go to Dock & Menu Bar. Then scroll down to Clock. Here's where you control what's shown here. So you can have the day of the week, the date, you can switch to an analog clock, use a 24 hour clock, control whether AM or PM is shown there. Even have the time separators flash every second and you can have the time displayed with seconds in addition to minutes. There's even a way here to have the time announced. So on the hour, half hour, or quarter hour you can have the time spoken by your Mac. 
Now if you want to customize keyboard shortcuts you, of course, would go to Keyboard. But there's a special set of shortcuts that you can't access there that you can get to in Mission Control. In Mission Control there are three different shortcuts here. Mission Control, Application windows, and Show Desktop. These can be set as keyboard shortcuts but they also can be set to use one of the two sets of modifier keys. So, for instance, if you always use the left Command key for shortcuts, like Command S, Command V, you can use the Right Command, a key you may otherwise never use, to trigger Mission Control, Application windows, or Show Desktop. So by switching to right Command for this, now I can use the right Command key on my keyboard and it brings up Mission Control. 
Now under Language & Region this is where you can set what language that you use for your Mac. So, for instance, my Mac is set to US English and that's the only one that i've got here. A lot of people have multiple languages here if you switch between languages. But a cool thing you could do is go to the Apps section here and set a custom language only for a specific app. So for instance, I could go in here and say well, while Safari is going to use my default maybe I'll use Chrome and have that set to use a different language instead. That can be really handy for people that have to use multiple languages and find themselves, maybe, always looking at the web with one language but maybe writing in Pages in another. 
In Notifications you've got your settings for Do Not Disturb. Select Do Not Disturb here on the left and now you can have Do Not Disturb turned automatically On or Off and set other things. So one really handy thing here is to check When Mirroring to TVs and Projectors. This will turn on Do Not Disturb whenever you connect to a projector. So if you give meeting presentations a lot Do Not Disturb automatically goes on and you won't see little messages, say, from your spouse or kids while you're giving your presentation to the Board of Directors. 
Now when it comes to obscure System Preferences of course the Accessibility settings are filled with them. There's tons of stuff in here that a lot of people don't know about. I'm just going to point out two. One is under Zoom you can enable Hover Text. When you do that you could hold your Command key down and then move your cursor over text like this. You have a much larger view of it. It also shows up while typing. So you could type using a nice small font that's appropriate for the document but as you type you get to see it nice and big. 
The other one I want to show you here is under Display. There's Increased Contrast. This is a very popular one nowadays because is changes macOS Big Sur from looking like this to looking like this. It's kind of a retro look that a lot of people find they like this. 
Now let's go to Security & Privacy.  In there under General you have to Unlock to get to these settings. There's a checkbox for Show a Message When the Screen is Locked.  So now you can set a message here and type whatever you want. Somebody who looks at your computer but the screen is locked and they can't unlock it, they see this message. So it's a handy way to put some contact information here in case you loose your MacBook or maybe just a message for any coworker that comes by your cubicle and tries to get access to your Mac.
So we go down to Sound now. There's a setting under Sound Effects here called Play Sound on Startup. So for decades Mac's always played a special startup sound and people really loved that. But for a little while Apple removed it from macOS so Mac's started up silently but there was an option to turn it On. Now that's a setting here in System Preferences, Play Sound on Startup. So if you like that sound you can have that turned On. But if you'd rather have your Mac startup silently then turn it Off. 
Now under Keyboard, in the Keyboard tab here, there's a setting for Press the Fn Key to and you have four options. So the fn key is found in different places on Mac keyboards. Most Mac keyboards, like on MacBooks, it's at the lower left hand corner. But the larger Mac extended keyboards have it in the middle under the F13 key. You can change what's done here. In the newer Mac keyboards you actually have a globe on this key and the characters fn. So you can go and actually have that functionality with the fn key show Emoji & Symbols. You can set it to Change Input Source if that's something you need to do often it's handy to have a key that does that. You can have it start dictation if you press fn twice or Do Nothing. If you have it set to Do Nothing it will still do the thing where it's switches what the F keys do. So depending upon this setting the F keys will either be special functions like Screen Brightness and Volume, or would be F1, F2, F3 shortcuts used by a lot of different apps. So you can toggle it right here. That still happens no matter what setting you've got. But you could also have a quick tap on the fn key to do one of these.
Now I want to show you a few things here for Displays. You've got Resolution, Default for Display or Scaled. Normally when you set it to Scaled you see these five options here. But if you Option Click on Scaled that will change to a list and you can access many more screen resolutions. Simply Option Click on Scaled again to switch back to this set of five. Now when you go to Arrangement you'll see all of your screens here and how they're arranged and you can drag them around. Of course if you only have one screen you'll just see that one screen here. There's not much you can do. But if you do have multiple screens a lot of people don't know that you can change what is the Primary Screen by clicking and dragging the Menu Bar that's at the top of the Main Screen now to another screen. Whichever one has the Menu Bar is considered the Primary Screen. Another thing I want to show you in Displays is Night Shift. Night Shift allows you to shift the colors on Displays to make them warmer after dark. So that's supposed to make it easier for you to fall asleep. So if you use your Mac late at night you may want to consider using this or maybe you just like a slightly different look of the screen at different times of the day. So you can set a schedule here or Sunset to Sunrise. You can turn it on right here manually. You could change the color temperature, less or more warm, right here under Night Shift. It got a lot of attention when it was first introduced a few years ago but I find today a lot of people don't know it's there. 
One last one I want to show you and that's when you go to Sharing. Under Sharing at the top here you've got Computer Name. That's the name of your Mac on the network. So if you're using a network at work or even at home and you've got a problem figuring out which Mac is which, you go here and change this name to anything that you want. So you can put your name or describe the computer. Maybe you've got three MacBooks at home and they are all called MacBook, right. You can change it to be Gary's MacBook, etc. It's definitely a very common question that I get, How do I change the name of my Mac as it's shown on the network. It's here under Sharing. A lot of people look for it under Network or maybe under General. But it's actually in Sharing that you find this.
So that's just a look at some of these really obscure things that you can find in System Preferences that are useful. There are tons more. I encourage you to go when you have time and look in every section of System Preferences. Look at all of the different settings and try to figure out what could be useful to you. There's a little question mark button at the bottom right hand corner. In most cases you could click that and get descriptions of a lot of these things to figure out what they do. If you really want to get the most out of your Mac it's worth it to take the time to do this to find out all the different ways that you can customize your Mac and change how it works.

Comments: 9 Responses to “15 Obscure System Preferences You Should Know About”

Nicholas Paul

4 years ago

HI Gary, I tried the option and click on scaled ( Mac Book Air with M!) but I do not see those different resolution settings as there is no response to that command. I do use one of the choices other than default but would like to see that extra flexibility. thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

Nicholas: You won't have any options that appear on most MacBooks. iMacs seem to have them, and any Mac that has an external screen too.

Dave

Are you showing system prefs for Catalina? Mojave doesn't look like yours with no Apple id or User picture

Dave: This is Big Sur, the current Mac operating system as of October, 2020. Back in Mojave things were arranged differently.

George Hammond

Cannot get the larger text to show when typing. It works great in the hove mode when holding down the command key, but not while typing.

Norman Probst

Really appreciate your videos. When on Zoom my name, first and last, shows up on the screen as one word. Can this be changed in system preferences some place. It appears to be picking it ups from my system. How can I change it.

Norman: That would be your name in your Zoom account.

Gene

Another great video. How did you learn to those and hold the Command key down?

Gene: See https://macmost.com/use-these-5-techniques-to-become-a-mac-pro.html

Comments Closed.

15 Obscure System Preferences You Should Know About

Comments: 9 Responses to “15 Obscure System Preferences You Should Know About”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information