20 Mac Annoyances And How To Fix Them

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some things about macOS that annoy some people and how to fix them. 

So here are a bunch of small features in macOS that may annoy you. Now note that every one of these has a reason for being there. So, some of them you actually may find useful and like while other may find annoying. For instance this first one I find very annoying. If you click on the Desktop what happens is all of the windows move aside and you have access to whatever is on the Desktop, like if you had files and folders here. I rarely keep anything on the Desktop and I don't really like this functionality. I often click on the Desktop in order to bring the Finder to the front. So, how to get rid of this? Well, it's in System Settings. If you go to Desktop & Dock there is a setting here, under Desktop & Stage Manager for to Click Wallpaper to Reveal Desktop. Switch it from Always to Only in Stage Manager. Now you can click on the Desktop all you want and it selects the Desktop but doesn't clear the other windows away. 

Note you can still clear the windows away if you want. If you go into Keyboard and then go to Keyboard Shortcuts, click on Mission Control. It is called Show Desktop. If you have that turned On and set to something like F11, and you may need to use the Globe or fn key in conjunction with that depending on your settings, to clear things away. 

Now another annoying thing is if you double-click on the Title Bar of a window, like this Pages window, it doesn't fill the screen. Notice there is still gaps on the left and right. What it actually does is it enlarges the window to be the largest size it needs to fit all the content and no larger. But you can change that to really make it fill the entire screen. The setting for that is in System Settings and then back into Desktop & Dock. Then right here near the top there's Double-click a windows title bar to......This is new in Sequoia. Zoom is the functionality where it gets just large enough. But Fill means it goes to the entire size of the screen. So now when I double-click here you can see it fills the entire screen. There's still a bit of a gap and that margin is the subject of my next annoyance.

That's using Window Tiling you often get this margin here. So if I move say to the left here and tile this to the left you can see there's a pretty big margin here. You can get rid of that with another setting. So that is also in Desktop & Dock. You can see here you've got Tiled Windows Have Margins. Turn that Off. Now you can see that window tiling results in it going to the very edge. So I can move this to say the right side and notice it fills the entire thing there. There's no margin. If I double-click here it will fill like before but the margin is gone there also. 

Now also another annoyance I've had people report is the whole idea of being able to drag to the edges, like the left edge or the right edge or even the corner like that, to position windows. Some people like it, others don't. They find that it is getting in the way of their normal movement. So, you can turn that Off as well in the same place. If you just switch Off the Drag windows to screen edges to tile, it won't do that anymore. So you notice now it doesn't try to tile here. 

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Some people often complain about the Dock. That it takes up too much space at the bottom of their screen. It is easy to fix that in a variety of different ways. So if we go back into Desktop & Dock and we look at Dock here. First you've got Size. You can actually make it larger or smaller. You also can position it, say on the right side of the screen or the left side of the screen as well as the bottom. You also have the option to automatically hide and show the dock. So the Dock is normally gone unless you move your pointer down to the bottom and it pops up. 

Now speaking of items in the Dock you've got this area here where there are three icons. These represent either apps you currently have open but they are not on the left side or apps you've recently had open. I kind of find this annoying. I'd rather have complete control of exactly what's in the Dock at all times. You can turn this off with Show Suggested and Recent Apps in the Dock, this setting right here. Now you can see that is gone. 

Let's talk about Windows and Apps. Typically when you are in an app like this and you've got Windows open, like say a document here in Pages. If you Quit Pages and then you launch it again, like that, it reopens all of the windows with the documents in them that were open before. So quitting and then resuming, reopening the app, brings everything back. I find this incredibly convenient and I love it. But I know some other people are annoyed by this. They want Quit to mean that everything gets closed and the next time they run the app it starts fresh. Well you can do this on a case-by-case basis by going to Quit here. Notice if I hold the Option Key down Quit changes to Quit and Close all Windows. So if I use this and now I relaunch Pages it relaunches without those windows. If you would rather have it behave that way every time you can go into System Settings here and then you can go to Desktop & Dock to this option here, Close Windows when quitting an application. If you turn that On then it will automatically close all the document windows when you quit an app. 

I'm often asked by people about the Cursor color. You can see the blinking line right there in Notes. Notice it's yellow in Notes. But if I go to another app, like say I go to Pages, then you can see the cursor is kind of this orange color. In Reminders you can see it's blue. So each app has its own specific accent color. That's why you see this color here in Notes. But you have control of this. If you go into System Settings and then go to Appearance the accent color is the color that is used there. So right now it is set to Multicolor, which means each app gets to choose its own color. So Notes will choose yellow. But if I were to change it to, say, purple then it overrides this for all apps. Now if I go into Notes, notice the cursor is purple. You also can choose a separate highlight color here. So right now purple is shows and you can see purple is the highlight color in Notes rather than yellow because I'm overriding it. If I set it to Multicolor and the accent color to be multicolor, it goes back to its normal yellow highlight and yellow cursor. 

Another thing people report as annoying, and I include myself here, is the Caps Lock key. It's too easy sometimes to accidentally press it and then you know everything you type is going to be in capital letters. If you just want to disable the Caps Lock key because you don't use it then you can go to System Settings and then go to Keyboard and then look for Keyboard Shortcuts. Go to Modifier Keys and Caps Lock key can be turned to No Action. 

Now another thing people report is annoying is a new feature in Sequoia where you have Caps Lock on you get this little icon here indicating that you've got it on. This can be really useful and help prevent mistakes where you type a whole sentence in caps before you realize it. But some people find it annoying, especially if the work you do involves using the Caps Lock key a lot. So, you can turn this off. But you're going to need a Terminal Command for this. This is the long terminal command and you're going to have to enter your password afterwards. It will disable this, but you have to log out and then log back in to your account before it takes effect. I've got a whole video that deals specifically with this if you want more details.  

Now a big annoyance for a lot of people is all the notifications that you may get, both showing up on the right side of your screen and in addition to that showing up in Notification Center over here. You can bring this under control by going to System Settings and then there is a whole section for Notifications. Then they are listed here by app. So you want to find the app that might be annoying you, because you're getting too many notifications from it. Select that app and then you can decide whether or not notifications are allowed at all. You can also decide how they appear. So you can have them here as alerts, banners, or not appear at all. 

Also, in Safari go to Safari and then Settings and then go to Websites. Then look for Notifications here. In here you're going to see any websites that you have allowed them to send you notifications. Sometimes they put up little permission dialogues that kind of trick you or maybe you're in a rush and you click okay because you think it means something else. So you can look and see here all the websites that can send you notifications that will appear at the upper right. You can Deny them or you can simply select and Remove, which will reset it. You can also turn off Allow Websites to Ask for Permission to send notifications to avoid accidentally agreeing to that in the future. 

Now another type of annoying notification are these little numbers that appear over apps. You may have a bunch of different apps here that have little numbers over them and they can be distracting when you're trying to be productive. You have control of these. These are called Badges. You can go into an app here. So that one was with Reminders. We can go into Reminders here and you can find Badge Application Icon. Turn that Off. Notice now there is no number there. So turn that off for any app that has that big red number there and you just don't care about it. 

One last annoyance having to do with Notifications. I find it annoying how the trackpad will sometimes bring up the Notification Center without me intending to do so. It does that because I take two fingers and I'm trying to swipe across the trackpad when I start too far to the right. When I go to the very edge of the trackpad and swipe with two fingers it brings up Notification Center. Your intention may have been just to do a normal two-finger drag, you just started over here. You can turn that Off by going into System Settings and then down to Trackpad. It's under More Gestures. Notification Center. Turn this Off. While you're there you may want to check the other gestures because some of those might be annoyances as well if you're accidentally triggering them.

Here are two annoyances in Safari. One is when you go to download a file sometimes that file automatically opens. But all you wanted to do was download and have it in your download folder. There is a setting for that in Safari Settings under General. You look for Open Saved Files after Downloading. 

Also when you click on a link, of course it goes to that page. But if you Command Click on it then it will open up another tab. Notice how it jumped to that tab. But let's say I don't want that to happen. I want it to open up in a new tab but I want to continue with this page and I'll get to another tab later. Well, you've got settings for this in Safari, Settings, and then look for Tabs. Now you can turn Off when a new Tab or Window opens, make it Active. 

Spotlight search is very useful. You can search for things like files and use it to launch apps. If you do a search for something pretty generic you're going to find a really long list of things here. It can sometimes take a little while to generate all the results and a lot of these you may not need., For instance, here it is showing me Font. I never want fonts to appear in a Spotlight Search. If I want to look at Fonts I'll go to Font Book. So it's really annoying to get too many things returned as a result here in Spotlight. You can control that in System Settings. There's a whole section here for Spotlight. You have all these boxes here that you can uncheck. So I can uncheck Fonts for instance. I can uncheck Mail and Messages. You can uncheck as much as you like to make Spotlight more useful. Just include the things that you really want to use Spotlight for.

I find it very useful to take a window full screen, like this, and now it uses the entire screen. But the Menu Bar is gone. I can bring the Menu Bar back by moving the pointer to the top and it drops down. But I'd rather have it always be there. Well you have control of that. In System Settings and you go to Control Center. This is really about Control Center and the Menu Bar. So it is right here. Automatically Hide/Show the Menu Bar. You've got Full Screen Only, Desktop Only, Always, or Never. So I can set it to Never which means never Hide the Menu Bar. So now when I go back to this space here, you can see the Menu Bar is always there. 

Now another annoyance has to do with when you have more than one display. So I've got two displays here and I've got two different windows open on each. But say I want to take this Pages document full screen. If I click the Green Button to do that or use any other method to go full screen look what happens to my other display. It goes blank. What happened there? Why? Shouldn't I be able to see stuff on that other display? Go into System Settings and then you go to Desktop & Dock, go all the way down to the bottom, and there's a setting here called Displays Have Separate Spaces. So if you have this turned Off then both displays are treated as one space. That's great because it allows you to do things like this, where you have a window that stretches across two different displays. But it means that if you take an app full screen it fills one of the displays and the other display is left blank. I find it much more useful to have displays that have separate spaces turned On and use it this way. Now notice to switch it requires a logout. So with Displays have Separate Spaces turned On I can no longer take this window and use it on another window. You can see it appears there kind of as a ghost. If I drop it, it's not going to be on both windows. Now if I take this full screen, because the displays have separate spaces, this can now display a space with a full screen app and this display here has a regular window and it has a regular desktop. It's treated as a separate space and I can now work with two displays more efficiently. 

Another annoyance involves Screenshots. I'm going to use Shift Command 5 to bring up all the Screenshot Controls here. I'm going to click on it this screen here to capture the entire screen. The thumbnail appears and after that goes away it will save to the Desktop. Maybe there's a particular folder you want to save it to or you want to choose where it goes each time. Let's bring up the Controls again. Shift Commands 5. Under options I can have it saved to any folder I want. By choosing Other Location and selecting the folder. Or I can choose Preview which will Open the Screenshot up in Preview immediately and then I can save from there. So now I can take a Screenshot like this. It opens up Preview. There it is. I can now work with it in Preview. I can close it with a Command W or Click the red button there and Delete or closing it also allows me to Save it anywhere I want. You can also use a quick Command S to save it anywhere I want. So you can use Preview as kind of your Save As function for screenshots. 

By the way I want to show you a small group of annoyances that appear in the Finder. The Finder includes a few warning messages that could be annoying if you keep having to deal with them. For instance, I'm going to move this file out of iCloud Drive here to my Home folder. So it is going to remove it from iCloud Drive and this will give me a Warning. Notice I've got Do Not Ask Again here. I can easily turn that off. There is actually a group of three warnings like this and you can find them by going to Finder and then Settings. Then go to Advance. You see these three check boxes here, Show Warning Before Changing an Extension, Show Warning Before Removing From iCloud Drive, and Show Warning Before Emptying the Trash. If any of these three are annoying you, you can simply turn them Off. 

So there are a bunch of ways to fix some annoyances you may have with using macOS. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.