200 Mac Tips And Tricks

Lots of Mac tips for using macOS Monterey. Tips on using the Finder, Menu Bar, Dock, System Preferences, Safari, Mail and much more including keyboard shortcuts and gestures. Something for everyone.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com and here's a huge collection of Mac tips.
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So let's start off here in the Finder. If you're using icon view like this it's easy to get the icons kind of out of alignment and really messy. You can clean them up a number of ways. Go to view, clean up and it will lock everything into a grid.
But to really clean it up go to view, cleanup by. Choose something like name and it will arrange them all by name in a perfect grid.
I however rarely use icon view and usually switch to one of the others. There's a button here that allows you to switch between the four modes. If you're wondering why this is only one button and then a list that pops up it's because the window is too small. If you increase the size of the window you eventually get the four buttons.
Here list view is one of the most useful views. Here you can click on these little arrows to the left of any folder to open it up and then you can open up subfolders or close subfolders like that.
You can also hold the option key down click on one of these and it will open up the folder and all of the subfolders inside it. Option clicking will close them all. You can also navigate with a keyboard very easily. So if I select this first folder I can use the down arrow to go to other folders and the up arrow as well.
I can use the right arrow to open something up, left arrow to close it. So now I can navigate down to any level that I want to get to the file I need. Left arrow will also close these. And in list view you've got columns up here you can set the sort order to any one of these columns by clicking on it. So i'm sorting by size now click on it again to change the direction like that. You can also rearrange these by clicking and dragging. So I can move size here to the right if you control click right click or two finger click on the trackpad on any of these you can add or remove columns. And you can also resize these by dragging the line in between them.
Another view I like is column view. This allows you to see all of your folders here and then you can go to subfolders and then keep digging down like that. And you can use the keyboard as well to navigate through these.
You can change the column widths by dragging the line here. If you option drag it will change all the columns at once and set that as the default width for a column.
You can also double click on any divider line and it will snap to the perfect size for that column. When in column view you usually see a preview here on the right. If you select a file you'll see a preview of it there. You can also see that in list view as well. You just need to go to view and then show preview and then it will appear there. That then changes to hide preview so you can get rid of it. It will even be there in icon view if you allow it.
You also have two bits of information here at the bottom. This is the path bar and the status bar. If you don't see those you can turn them on and off right here path bar and status bar.
When you select a file you can get info on it by going to file get info or command I. Now no matter what file you select after that the info window is still going to show you the info for the file that you originally asked for. But if instead you go to file get info and hold the option key down that changes to show inspector or option command I. This brings up the inspector window here and this will change to show you information about whatever is selected.
Better yet it will also show you information for multiple items. So I can select three items here it says three items and gives me the total size when you're in a folder like this.
If you ever want to go up a level all you need to do is use go enclosing folder or command up arrow. You can also hold the command key down and click on the title right here and you can go up to any level above this one.
To jump to some common places on your drive you can use the go menu and there are keyboard shortcuts for this as well. So for instance to get to the documents folder it's really handy to use shift command o. But you can get to other places like for instance the applications folder is shift command a. The main computer level is shift command c. And your downloads folder is option command l.
There's also a hidden one here if you go to the go menu and hold the option key down you'll see library up here. That's your user library not the system library folder. So you can easily get to it with go and then hold option and then select library.
So whatever view you're in you've got more view options under view show view options or command j and gives you a ton of different things that you can change here.
For instance the icon size here can go larger. You can select to calculate all sizes meaning all the folder sizes as well as file sizes. And this will change depending upon what view you're in so in icon view it changes to this and now you can change the icon size. You can also change the text size of the labels or the position so the labels on the right rather than the bottom. In an icon view you can even set a background color for the folder or a picture as the background. In column view you get these options here including whether or not to even show the icons. This gives you more space for the names in each column. And in gallery view you can select the thumbnail size.
If you need to rename a file. You could select it and then go to file and then rename but the shortcut for that is simply pressing return that enters rename mode and it automatically selects everything before the file extension. If you want to select everything including the file extension a quick command a will do that for you and now you can type the new name.
You can also compress files really easily by control clicking right clicking or two finger clicking on the trackpad and selecting the compress option. This will quickly create a zip file for that file that you have selected.
And if you select multiple files and then do it for that you'll get one file that contains all three .Really handy for sending a collection of files to somebody over email.
In the left sidebar here you should see favorites. As the thing on top you can open and close it like that. If you have icloud drive turned on using desktop and documents folders you'll see desktop and documents here but you can drag those to favorites if you'd rather see them up there. And then you no longer need to have icloud open.
You could also add any other folders you want here so if we go back up to the documents folder if I want to have this business folder here I can easily add it. And now it's here in favorites. Now whenever I want to go to that folder I can easily click there and jump to it. Plus if I ever want to drag something into that folder I could do that by clicking and dragging right into the sidebar folder. I don't have to navigate to that folder in another window or anything.
Another way to move files in the Finder besides drag and drop is copy and paste. So for instance I could select these two files here and I could do edit copy or command c. I can go to another location like this one and if I do command v it would paste those two items make a copy of those two items in this location. If I hold the option key down so use option command v it will move them there. So to move files I can do command c to copy go to the new location and option command v to move them.
If you have no Finder window open and you create a new Finder window it will go to a default location. You could set that in preferences under general new Finder window show. And you could select documents you can select your home folder you can select anything you want using other and select any folder anywhere.
Also here in Finder preferences. You can select some default things that are included in the sidebar so for instance recents. You can turn that on or off airdrop on or off and other common folders as well. This is also where you can decide whether things like external drives or connected servers will appear here in the sidebar.
When you want to delete a file you normally would select it drag it and add it to the trash. But a keyboard shortcut for that is simply use command delete and that will move something to the trash.
You can also get something out of the trash and have it go back to its original location. I've just removed that file here from this folder let's go to this folder here and i'll also delete this file. Now when I look at the trash I can see two files here. I can select them both and then choose file and put back and it will put both of those back into their original locations.
When you're looking at a folder like this that is a mix of folders and files sometimes it's useful to see the folders on top. You can do that by going to Finder preferences and under advanced change the setting here to keep folders on top in windows when sorting by name. And now you can see how these appear on the top. Make sure you're sorting by name if you're shorting by anything else like size then it's going to mix the folders in.
Another preference for the Finder is here under advanced and it's when performing a search and set the default scope for that search. So you can always have it start by searching this mac, search the current folder, or use the previous search scope. So for instance when set to search the current folder and I start a search here with command f you can see it starts with the current folder. I could switch to this mac if I want to but the current folder is going to be the default every time I use the shortcut to get there.
And speaking of search when I do command f for find I can have multiple search criteria here. So like for instance I could say kind is image and I can hit the plus button there and say also the name matches and anything with img in the name. I could also hold the option key down here and the plus changes to three dots. If I select that I can group together criteria and say any of the following are true all of the following are true or none of the following are true. So these allow you to do basically and or not statements inside of a search and get really complex searches.
You also don't just have to settle for these sets of things to search for. You can go to other and there are a ton of different criteria you can use for a search. A lot of these apply to things like videos and images. It's the metadata inside the files. But there's all sorts of interesting things here that could help you find just the files that you want.
And back to using the trash. Let's say you have a bunch of files in the trash you want to review them before you delete them but there's a file you want to delete right now. If you select a file and go to file move to trash or command delete it'll just add it to the trash. But if you do option command delete it changes to delete immediately this item will skip the trash and be immediately deleted. Try not to use this. The trash is there for a reason as a safety net.
Now usually when we think of tabs we think of the browser. But you can use tabs in Finder as well. I do all the time. So here i've got this folder open i'm going to do command t to open a new tab and I can go to a different location here. So i've got two locations open it's easy to actually move between the two of them. I can actually drag and drop using spring loading to move over the tab here and it will then open up that tab and now I can drop that file in. And if you have multiple tabs open you can show all the tabs just like you do in the browser. You can go to view and then show all tabs or shift command and then the backslash and then it brings them up like this even with a plus button here to create a new tab. Then you can jump to the tab that you want.
And by the way spring loading works with folders as well so let's say I want to move a file here into this folder. I can hold it over the folder and wait it'll open it up and then I can drop it in. It even works in multiple levels so for instance I can go into this folder and then into this folder and then drop it there.
Now let's look at some tips for using windows. You can of course click and drag anywhere at the top here that doesn't have a button in it to move a window around. But there's also another way to reposition a window that a lot of people like. To set it up you need to go into System Preferences and then accessibility and then scroll down to pointer control. Click on trackpad options and here you'll see enable dragging and then set it to three finger drag. Once you do that you can use three fingers anywhere at the top and it will drag the window around. It only works at the top though.
You can also change the size of the window by dragging the sides or the corners. So you can click and drag any side including the top and the bottom to resize the window or any corner to resize from that corner. Now if you hold the option key down it does the current side and the opposite side at the same time. So you can see how it's doing the left and right there or the top and bottom there. The same thing is true for corners so you can do both corners or in other words all four sides by holding the option key. Now you can also double click on any side and it will snap to the edge of the window like that. If you hold the option key down and double click it does that side and the opposite side. So here I have both the left and right snap to the sides of the screen. And then if you option double click on any corner then it will snap all four corners to the sides there. So it's a way to maximize the window size that works better than using window zoom because that doesn't always go to the maximum size. Instead it goes to the maximum size that makes sense for the content of the window. But option double clicking on a corner will always maximize it to the size of the screen.
MacOS also has windows snapping but a lot of people don't even realize this. So here i've got two windows and if I take this window and move it over to this one here it's going to appear to snap to that one. If I keep moving it eventually will go beyond it but it will kind of stick to that window. So if you set this window up like this and you want this next window to be right next to it you can it'll kind of stick there. It'll even stick to the top there and then I could easily have one window exactly next to the other.
You can also automatically position windows by using a special command hidden here in the green button. Usually if you roll over the green button you'll see tile window to left side or right side that goes into split view mode but. If you hold the option key down these change to move window to left or right side. So I can have this window take up exactly the left side of the screen and then this window take up exactly the right side of the screen. They also appear under window you see tile if I hold the option key down it changes to move and now I can have two windows taking up exactly half the screen without having to manually position them.
Here are some menu bar tips. In the apple menu you've got things like restart and shut down. If you choose restart it's going to come up with dialogs and all that. But if you hold the option key down the three dots goes away and you can skip the confirmation dialogs. Same for shutdown and also for log out. Holding the option key down also allows you to go directly to system information. Usually you would choose about this mac click system report. But if you hold the option key down you can go right to system info. And there's also kind of a hidden one here. We expect to use option but shift will actually change force quit to force quit Finder. So if you ever need to force quit or restart the Finder you can use the keyboard shortcut option shift command and then escape to do that.
My favorite tip for the menu bar is using the help search here to find commands. You would expect to find documentation here but it does more than that. So for instance under view you've got sort by and then you've got size. If I were to go to the help menu here and type size you can see it finds that menu item by its name and I can actually select it here. So if you forget where a hidden menu command is in any app you can use the help menu to find it and activate it.
And you can get to the help menu with the keyboard shortcut command shift and then the question mark key. And it's automatically ready for you to type in search so you type in search down arrow to the command and then return to use it.
Finder also has a really unique window under edit. It's got show clipboard and this will show the contents of the clipboard whatever's in there. So whatever you last copied with command c.
Let's look at more System Preferences tips. Of course there are a ton of tips in here. Let's start off in general and there's one here called close windows when quitting an app. If you select that every time you quit an app with command q or file quit it will close all of the open windows so the next time you open the app there are going to be no documents or windows open. If you have this turned off and you quit an app and you've got a bunch of windows open the next time you launch the app all those will return. So choose which one you prefer right here in System Preferences general.
Also notice that you could change the wallpaper tinting here. It may look like the background for this window is white but it's actually tinted a little purple because of the background. If I turn this off you can see the difference.
Another good one here is sidebar icon size. So if I bring up a Finder window I could see the icons here in the sidebar and I can change that to large or small.
Under dock and menu bar there are two check boxes at the bottom as long as you have dock or menu bar selected here on the left. One is to automatically hide and show the menu bar in full screen. If you turn that off you'll get the menu bar even in full screen apps. And then the one above that is automatically hide and show the menu bar on the desktop. So the menu bar normally is there but if I select that the menu bar goes away giving you extra screen real estate. Moving the pointer to the top brings it back.
There are a lot of options here for the dock that you can set according to what you prefer. Some people prefer not to have the dock at the bottom of the screen at all but to have it set to the left or right side of the screen instead.
Also you may see in the menu bar the three most recent applications that you've opened that are not normally in the dock. That option is right here. A lot of people don't like having that there they want their dock to remain the same at all times so just have that turned off.
Now here in the sidebar if you scroll all the way down and go to clock this is where you have all the settings for how the clock appears. So you can decide whether or not the date or day of the week is there, what type of clock to show, whether to show am pm, and all of that. You can even have the clock announce the time on the hour half hour quarter hour in any voice installed on your mac.
Under mission control there's the hidden feature hot corners. Click on that and you can set up any corner to perform a variety of functions. So this will be triggered when you move your pointer to there. So for instance you can have launchpad appear when you move to the top right. There are a lot of different options and you can simply select to have it turned off. But also you can combine this with a modifier key. So for instance I can hold the command key down and now launchpad will only appear if I hold the command key down and move my pointer to the top right.
In siri a lot of people don't know that you can change the siri voice. There are a whole bunch of different ones so you could go to voice variety and select one here and then select the voice. For americans there are actually four different siri voices now and you can pick which one that you want under language and region.
You of course set the preferred languages used throughout your mac but you can also customize those per app. So for instance if you want to use one language for just about everything that you do but maybe for word processing you're going to use another language you can choose the app to use for word processing and set a different language for that.
A lot of really interesting things are available under accessibility. Even if you don't strictly need these features they can be really useful for everybody. For instance under zoom you can use zoom here with a keyboard shortcut and what you'll get is a little window here that moves around with the mouse and magnifies what's under the screen. And it's really easy to turn on and off with that keyboard shortcut to zoom in and out and to change how it works. It's really handy when something is a little too small to see especially if you're editing images.
Under display you've got the ability to reduce the transparency just like we saw in System Preferences earlier. But it works with more things like the dock. And also you can choose increase contrast and it will outline things like this giving your mac kind of a retro look.
If you find the text in the menu bar a little too small to see you can also change the menu bar size to a larger size. Under audio there's the handy thing here to flash the screen when an alert sound occurs and this is handy for when you're in a noisy environment or you like to have the volume turned down on your mac. And under siri here you can enable type to siri when you do that instead of speaking to siri you actually type something.
And you could couple that with going into siri preferences here and then turning off voice feedback. So now siri is completely silent I can ask questions by typing and just get responses by seeing them there on the screen. This is handy in an office environment where you don't want to be speaking out loud to your computer or having siri tell everybody the information that you're looking up.
Now under keyboard there's a lot here that you can do. If you go to shortcuts you can set the shortcut for anything in any app as long as it's in a menu. So for instance in Finder if I go to edit there's that show clipboard I showed you before. There's no keyboard shortcut for it but I can create one by going to app shortcuts clicking the plus button typing exactly the name of the menu item.
Setting the application. In this case it will be Finder. And then setting a keyboard shortcut so i'll do control option command c and add. And now in the Finder here i'll see that that's got this keyboard shortcut and it works and you can always go back and change these very easily you can remove them. And it also works to change some of the default keyboard shortcuts for things you can go in and alter what it is.
Another handy thing here is use text replacements. So you can set up any one thing to be replaced with something else. So for instance I could type something like xtest and have that replaced with this is a test. Now when i'm typing in an app could be textedit could be pages could be mail I can type that and when I hit space or return it replaces it with what I want. You can also use this as an easy way to type emoji that you use all the time. So for instance I can do something like exclamation point celebrate and then do control command space look for the little celebration emoji there. And now instead of having to remember how to type that or bring up the emoji and special character viewer I can just type !celebrate and it replaces it with that emoji. You can use that for special symbols and all sorts of things as well.
Under displays if you have multiple displays connected to your mac you can set which one of the main display by putting the menu bar there. See how there's a menu bar over this display you can click and drag that menu bar and put it on another display. Whichever display has the menu bar is the primary display for your mac.
If you have multiple macs in your house then you could go to sharing and then go to content caching and there if you turn on content caching. You can select shared content only icloud content or all content. So things like software update and your iCloud content will download to this mac and be shared by other things. It's going to use extra space on your drive so do this if you've got one mac that has a big hard drive and it's kind of your main mac and then you have other macs in your household if you turn this on it'll basically speed up things like updates and accessing icloud files for all the other machines.
Let's take a look at some launchpad tips. Of course you can use launchpad by clicking on it here in the dock. But it's usually easier to do a keyboard shortcut if you go back into System Preferences keyboard shortcuts and then you look at launchpad here you've got show launchpad and you can set a shortcut for that. So i've set that to shift command space here so now shift command space brings up launchpad.
Now you may think that the best way to launch apps is spotlight and it usually is. So if I type command space and start typing something usually the app comes up pretty quick. But sometimes it doesn't depending upon what options you've got for spotlight it could take a little while for the app to actually show up and then you can launch it. But launchpad is usually lightning fast. So shift command space and start typing just like before and return and you can launch it with no delay.
Another tip for launch pad is you can click and hold or control click on the icon here and you get an alphabetical list of items starting with a at the bottom. And if you control click on it and then type a letter it will jump right to that section and you can use the up and down arrows and then return to launch.
If you're annoyed by having a ton of apps in launchpad you can always combine things into folders. So you can just drag and drop a couple of icons onto each other and create folders and you can place multiple apps in there. You can even just create a folder for all the apps that you really just don't want to see in launchpad and stick it out of the way at the end to clean things up.
So here's some spotlight tips. Of course you do command space to bring up spotlight search. But before you do that it pays to speed it up a bit by going into System Preferences and then going to spotlight and then unchecking things that you don't really need. For instance you're probably not going to be using spotlight to look up fonts and you may not be using it to look up mail preferring to do that inside the mail app. So turn off the things that you don't want to find in spotlight and now you can do really cool things like use it as a calculator. Not only can you do basic calculations like this but you can also do really complex things. Like for instance some things with parentheses that are not easy to do using a calculator. You can even use functions like square root or sine. And it's handy for unit conversions so for instance you can do 60 inches and it will give you some common conversions for that like meters. But you can do in and then a unit like that and get it in something else so you know 50 km in miles will give you that result. You can also do currency conversions so if I were to type something like 100 I would get the price in euros. But I could do in yen and it will give me yen. And it's looking up the current price online.
And you can even look up other information online. To enable that i'm going to go back here into settings and turn on siri suggestions. And now I can do things like weather in new york. And you can see it gives me the weather there. If I then hit tab it will then activate this item and give me all this information here. You can do sports by typing a team name and then tab will give you details. You can do stocks and then tab will give you a chart and everything. You can do flights and you even get a map showing its location. You can type a location and it will look up that address and then if you hit tab you get it on a map and you get lots of other information as well. As a matter of fact you can look up things in wikipedia using spotlight so just type something in spotlight like that and then if you look under siri knowledge down here. And I can arrow down to it or command arrow to jump to the next category so right there you can see I get wikipedia information right here.
One frustrating thing about the spotlight search field here is you can drag it and then it's no longer centered. So getting it back to center you either have to kind of do it manually. But you can also use this spotlight icon here in the menu bar if you click and hold it it will eventually snap back to its original location.
So let's take a look at the dock. There are a lot of ways to customize the dock of course you can add any apps that you want. In the Finder create a new Finder window and go to the applications folder and then select any app that you want to add to the dock and just drag it into the dock at any position you can add it there. To remove it simply drag it up and away like that. You can also rearrange the order of apps in the dock like that.
Now the left side of the dock is for apps the right side of the dock is for files and folders. So if you want to add a folder to the dock add it to the right side and then it will appear there. When you click it it will come up. This is called a stack. You can control click right click or two finger click and change how the content is viewed. So you can have it be fan which looks like this. You could have it be grid which looks like this. And you could have it be list which looks like this. And it's handy for digging down into subfolders as well. You could sort any way you want and have it displayed as a folder or a stack of items. You could also add files here so if there's a file that you access all the time you can add it to the right side of the dock and to open it. All you need to do is click it and that file will open now.
The notification center here on the right is highly customizable. Just scroll down to the bottom and you'll see edit widgets then you'll be in the special mode where you can add widgets from a variety of different apps. There'll be built-in apps but also third-party apps that you've added to your mac. A lot of hidden functionalities here for instance in calendar there's a monthly calendar that you could add. In news you could add news for a specific topic and special topic or source. For notes you could add for a folder containing a list of notes or a single note that appears there. And while you're editing you can drag and drop to rearrange these. You can also click to access options for each individual item.
Control center is where you'll find a lot of different settings for things on your mac. It's easier to access them here than System Preferences. If you move your pointer over them and you see a little arrow like that that means you can click the arrow and dig down deeper. You could also drag and drop items from control center into the menu bar. So for instance I could drag sound up here and add a sound icon and then access those items here without having to go to control center to get to them.
These menu bar items here can be rearranged by holding the command key down and clicking and dragging left to right. And if you drag down till you see the x you can remove one.
So here are some tips for typing. I'm going to use mail as an example here but you could be typing in pages or textedit or even in a form in Safari. So if you need to type an accent mark just get to that letter with the accent mark and instead of just quickly pressing the key press and hold and then you'll get a list of accent marks for that letter. You can either type the number of the accent mark you want or use the pointer to click it. If you want to type an emoji or any symbol use control command space and then you can select the emoji or symbol. There's a huge list of them but you can use search up here to find what you want. If you don't find exactly what you want with the first search term you try try another to see what you come up with. And this is useful for finding symbols as well.
Now while typing the position of the text cursor is the blinking line. And you can use the arrow keys left and right to move back and forth. If you hold the option key down you can move by word which is usually a much quicker way to move around in your text. If you hold the shift key while using the arrow keys it selects text and that works with the option key as well. So shift option will select by word.
Of course using the delete key will delete the previous character but if you want to delete forward you can hold the fn key and then delete and it will delete the character in front.
There are a couple different ways to auto complete on the mac. By default you should see auto completions like that and then just hitting a space will auto complete. But you can also press f5 or the fn key and f5 depending upon your settings and it will bring up a list of completions and you can select one also.
Instead of using a period and a space at the end of a sentence you can just use two spaces and it will give you a period and a space instead. This is a setting in System Preferences under keyboard text add period with double space.
There's also a variety of easy text transformations that you can use so you can select some text and then go to edit transformations and you can make everything uppercase or you can make everything lowercase or capitalize every word.
Searching for things in text involves using command f and then searching and it will find the first occurrence of that. You can always after that use command g to find the next occurrence.
If you want something that you've typed to be read back to you a very useful technique for editing and checking your text you can go to edit speech and start speaking and it will speak the selected text.
You could also use two different types of dictation. The simplest type is in System Preferences under keyboard go to dictation and enable that. And you'll see the shortcut here in this case pressing ctrl twice and then you can dictate short passages instead of typing them.
Thank you period
So in your keyboard you usually see just one dash to the right of the zero key. This is actually a hyphen that you use to hyphenate words. If you want to use an n-dash which is usually for ranges like 100 to 200 instead of using that use option and the dash for that type of hyphen. If you want to use the even longer m dash for separating parts of a sentence do option shift and dash to get the m dash.
If you have a lot of icons on your desktop you can do a bunch of different things to clean them up just like with regular Finder windows. If you select the desktop and i'll click on the background here to make sure it's selected I can go to view and then I could clean up which will move things to a grid position. But I could also do view cleanup by and say by name which will move them starting at the top right and sort them. But you could also control click on the desktop and do things like use stacks and this will group together like items like these images into a stack that you could open or close. You can group stacks by something other than kind for instance you can do it by date created and it will group them by years or months or things like yesterday and today. And also if you select the desktop and go to view show view options you'll see lots of options here like the icon size grid spacing text size put the text on the right side and even show item info which will do things like show image dimensions.
Now let's look at some Safari tips. In Safari one of the most useful things I find is having the favorites bar turned on so you can go to view and then show favorites bar and what you're going to see here are the bookmarks that you have inside of the favorites folder. The favorites folder is a normal folder in bookmarks and you can add different bookmarks or create folders inside of favorites. If you select favorites here click new folder you can create a new folder. The only difference is the favorites folder has a special function where it can be displayed here as a bar here. And it's extra useful if you use folders here rather than putting the actual bookmarks right at the top level. So now here in the favorites bar I can click and then select a different bookmark. You can also open in new tabs here so if I wanted to access all of my business web pages instead of opening four different pages here I can open a new tabs and it will open all four of these bookmarks in four different tabs.
And speaking of tabs if you click here you can see the different tab groups that you've got. Maybe you haven't created any yet but if you use multiple tabs like this you can at any time you want click here and create a new tab group with them and then have these different tab groups showing different sets of tabs. It's just an organizational tool whereas before you may have had 20 different tabs now you can say have five tab groups with four tabs in each making it a little bit easier for you to see which tabs are where.
Now when viewing an article in Safari often the best way to read it is to do it in reader view. So you can go to view and then show reader and then it comes up in this way and you can see the text of the article usually the images as well without all the navigation elements and without the ads. There's usually a button right here for you to enter and exit reader view as well. And of course the shortcut comes in handy. If you see an article you want to read but you don't have time right now the best thing to do is not bookmark it which is kind of a way to permanently save it but just simply add it to the reading list. So under bookmarks select add to reading list and then go to the reading list sidebar here and you can see all the articles that you've saved for reading later on. Now let's say there's a site that you go to where you always want to see things in reader view well you could do that by going to Safari preferences and then go to websites and then you're going to see here a list of sites and a list of features so for instance for reader view. You can select this and see the site that you're currently at and then say I want it to always be on for the site you can also select the default for others although reader view probably it's not a good idea to have that on by default because you won't be able to see a lot of the content on some websites.
You could do the same thing for lots of other things. Like for instance if there's a website that's always asking for your location because say it's giving you location-based information like weather or directions or something you can go to location and instead of having it ask each time you could simply allow it for that website. This is really handy for auto play so you can have auto play for a site set to allow it or don't allow it if there's sound or never auto play. So that way the sites that have video you just want the video to play when you get to the site. You can have that happen but for other sites you have to actually start the video manually.
And by the way you can use picture and picture to watch any video that you see in Safari sometimes it's a little tricky like here in youtube. If you control click on the video first you're going to get a set of controls from youtube. But ctrl click a second time and now you'll get Safari's controls and here you can go into picture-in-picture mode. The video comes out like that you can actually move this window away and do other work while the video is playing.
Safari also has built-in translation when you go to a page that's not using the same language here you can click there and then translate web page and it will translate the text for you. But you also have systemwide translation in MacOS Montere.y so you can select some text like this control click on it and then select translate just to translate that portion.
If you ever work with a website that you need to log into like any social media site or things like that and you have multiple accounts it can be tricky to always be logging out of your main account to log into a secondary account. But you could just create a new private window in Safari. This private window and the main window act like completely different browsers so you can say be logged into one twitter account in your main window and use a private window to log into another twitter account. And as soon as you close that private window you're logged out of that account now and you haven't logged out of the main account in your first window.
One of the most powerful changes you can make in Safari is to change your search engine. If you go into Safari preferences and then to search you don't have to use google as your default search engine you can use any one of these. So change to the one that you want including these last two which are a little better for privacy. And just because you set one up as your main search engine doesn't mean that you can't go manually to another search engine and use that. The default search engine is just what is used when you type something in the field at the top.
Also if you don't like just seeing the website at the top and you want to see the full address that's also a preference in Safari. Just go to preferences advanced and select show full website address to see the whole thing.
Here here's some tips for the productivity app starting with contacts. If you have an address and contacts you can actually go to the map location by clicking here but better yet you can actually look up the name just like it was the name of a location. So if I go into contacts and I do command f for find and then search for that name it'll come up with the address that's listed for that contact.
You can also add fields here for the phonetic pronunciation of the name of the person or company it's under more fields so phonetic first and last name phonetic company. And this will help siri understand you when you say the name and pronounce the name correctly back to you.
Contacts app also has some interesting printing functionality that a lot of people don't realize. First select all the names that you want to print then go to file print and then here you can print as a list. You can do it as envelopes and you can do it as mailing labels as well.
If you ever want to send somebody all of the information in a contact all you need to do is drag and drop it and it becomes a standard vcf file you can attach that to an email or send it to them in a message any way you want.
The reminders app has some great functionality for tagging reminders so you can add a tag to the actual reminder itself just by using the hashtag symbol and a word or you can add it as a tag in a separate field here. You can see if I go to info there actually is a spot here for tags and then you can view all of the reminders from all the different lists that have that tag applied to it.
If you have a list and want to apply tags to everything in the list you can select the list go to file convert to smart list and it will add a tag to every single item in the list and create a smart list using that tag.
You can convert reminders to text by just having a text editor open like textedit here and then selecting a bunch of reminders. Drag and drop them in and you get the text from those reminders now as text in your document.
The notes app has the ability to lock notes. So you select any note that you want to lock. You select lock node here at the top it'll ask you to set password if you've already created a password for locked notes it'll ask you to enter it and now. This is a locked note. At any time I can close all the locked notes and you can see it's locked and I can't get access to it until I enter the password. You can always remove the lock from any note.
If there's note you want to see in a window by itself just double click it and it will open up in its own window. But that window will still go behind other windows like that. But if you select the window there and say window float on top now this window always will float on top of everything else. So even if you open up something like say a browser window this notes window is going to be here making it really easy for you to take notes without the window disappearing behind things all the time.
Your mac has a handy app on it called activity monitor. Just bring up the app and you can see a variety of different things here. For instance you can see all the processes and sort by the amount of cpu they're using or the amount of memory that they're using or energy or disk access. Note that the icon here in the dock actually shows you a graph of what's going on and you can change that graph by going to view and then dock icon. And you can select different modes for the dock icon. If your mac has trouble going to sleep go to energy and then look under preventing right here and then look here for what's preventing sleep. So for instance right now my screen recording software is preventing the mac from going to sleep as it should but if your mac isn't going to sleep you may want to check here to see what is listed as yes that you may want to quit.
Here are some tips for the mail app. So in the mail app and preferences there are some settings here that you may want to change. For instance doc unread count will show you this red dot here with the number of unread messages. It could be for inbox only but having it set to all mailboxes can sometimes show a lot of unread email. For instance all the email that's automatically filtered into other folders. Or you may just want to have it just so unread for today.
So under composing there are some settings here for what happens when you reply to an email so you can have the original text of the message automatically quoted. So when I respond to an email like this you can see that's quoted there. But you don't have to settle for that you can alter it on a case-by-case basis. If there's a question somewhere in here and you just want to have that quoted select it then hit reply and only the selected portion will be there. The setting for this is when quoting text and replies or forwards. And then select include selected text.
For signatures you have to set your default signature. Just adding one isn't enough. You actually have to go for each account and drag it in and then set it up as the default. So for this one choose the signature like that so then when I reply to this email it's automatically put there. And you can decide whether the signature is placed above quoted text or below it by this checkbox.
When you're replying to a message or sending out a new one if you attach an image make sure you pay attention to where it says image size right here. You'll see actual large medium or small if the image is already pretty small you may not see large or medium. So you can select one of these and it will compress the image down making it much smaller and easier for the other person to receive. Actual size will be the original image.
Now sometimes when you start to type in the to field here you'll type something and it will auto complete with maybe an email address you don't even recognize. It's getting that from a list of previous recipients. It's automatically building that list every time you get a new piece of email. But you can go to window and then previous recipients and then select as many as you want or select them all and remove from list to have it stop auto filling in email addresses that aren't in your contacts.
So here's some notification center tips when you get notifications at the top they appear here on top of your widgets you can click here and it will expand it. And you also see these three dots click there and you can mute notifications for this app for an hour for the rest of the day or just turn off notifications right here for this app. You can also jump to notifications preferences which goes to System Preferences and then notifications and focus. So you can see it's selected that app here and I can change how things look. So you can set exactly how notifications for this app work. Either no notifications at all only banners which will appear and then go away and alerts which appear and then stay there. Both banners and alerts will appear here in notification center though when you bring it up but you can turn it off with this check box here so they don't appear.
You also have control of the badge app icon that's this little thing here like for mail you see that one there. So if I go to mail and I turn off the badge app icon you can see that number goes away. So if you have some app that's got a big number there and you just don't care about that you can turn that off and not be bothered by the number.
Each app has slightly different notification settings so you may want to go in to each of these apps and take a look and change it to how you want. You can always just turn notifications off completely for that app. You can also have the grouping go by app or off so for instance for messages you may want to have no grouping so every message is separate or you may want to have it set to automatic or by app. So that all of the messages notifications are grouped together and it will never take up more than one spot.
Now focus is the new feature in Monterey that allows you to set do not disturb mode. So you've got your default do not disturb mode. But you can also create other ones and those can allow notifications from various contacts and you can set options for those notifications. You can also allow notifications from specific apps and then you can easily switch between these modes. So instead of having do not disturb on or off you now have various modes. You can use control center to easily switch the focus modes to what you want.
If you're using a trackpad and most mac users are because they have macbooks with the trackpad built in then there are a lot of cool tips here inside of trackpad settings. So for under point and click you can have lookup and data detectors. That's when there's an address or a phone number in some text and you could just tap with three fingers or force click with one finger to bring that up secondary click is like the right click that brings up the context menu. And you can set exactly how that works. So you can have clicking at the bottom right hand corner be the way to bring that.
Up you can also set tap to click this means that instead of actually having to press down on the trackpad just to tap on the surface will be the same as a click. And if you don't like the sound the trackpad makes you can turn on silent clicking and it will make any sound at all. Under more gestures you can set other things. For instance notification center can be set when you swipe left from the right edge of the trackpad. That's not the right edge of the screen that's the right edge of the trackpad and notification center comes up and you can do the opposite movement to dismiss it. You can have mission control set to be a trackpad gesture where you can swipe up with three or four fingers. You can also have a launch pad brought up when you pinch with a thumb and three fingers. So check out all of these options and try them out.
The mouse has fewer gestures but you can change the side for the right click. And you can under more gestures choose whether or not you can swipe between pages with the surface of the magic mouse or swipe between full screen apps. And a way to bring up mission control using a double tap with two fingers.
So for the keyboard you can determine how those f keys at the top work. For instance with this checkbox turned off they work as standard function keys. So with this turned off the f1 key is actually the f1 key. If the app you're using has a keyboard shortcut for f1 it will work just by pressing that key. On the other hand if you want to do things like volume or brightness controls you have to hold the fn or globe key on your mac for that to happen. If you turn this checkbox on it reverses how that works. You can also have the fn key do something when you press it just by itself for instance it could change the input source it could show the emoji and symbols viewer there or it could start dictation that would be pressing it twice.
By the way there are a few easy ways to get to certain System Preferences if you have System Preferences in your dock you can press and hold and jump right to one of the System Preferences. If you're in System Preferences and you're not sure where something is just search for it and then when you find it it will take you right to that section. And here you can also click and hold this button right here to bring up an alphabetical list or you can change to sort everything alphabetically.
To take a screenshot on your mac first check the System Preferences for the keyboard shortcuts. By default they are set up as 3 4 and 5 using shift command or control shift command. However the one keyboard shortcut that rules them all is shift command 5. That gives you access to everything so when you shift command 5 it will bring up this control here that you can move around. And you can decide whether to capture the entire screen selected window a portion of the screen you can record as a video the entire screen or portion of the screen as well. You also have options here like being able to capture the mouse or where it gets saved. So if you choose a destination like the desktop and you also have show floating thumbnail turned on then when you capture you'll see a thumbnail there. Click that and now you can mark up the screenshot various different ways drawing lines on it adding things like arrows and text and even cropping the image all before you're done with it and it's saved or you share it out in some way like directly to email.
Mission control is a great way to use the space on your screen if you have a mac with just one display. So you can use control and up arrow to get into mission control and here you can see the different spaces listed at the top and you can add a new space it's a second desktop. So I can be on desktop one and I can launch an app like say Safari and I can then use control up arrow and I can see Safari is here on this one desktop. But I could also move it over to this other desktop. And I can move back and forth between these two with ctrl right arrow and ctrl left arrow or a trackpad gesture. So this one could be displaying say my calendar and I control right arrow over to this one that's displaying Safari.
Anytime you take an app full screen like that it becomes its own space. So now i've got desktop one desktop two and a full screen version of Safari. So now I could switch between these using control left arrow and control right arrow or ctrl up arrow to go to mission control and just select which one I want to jump to.
And you can even have two apps together as something that's called split view. So for instance here i've got calendar and let's say we'll open up notes at the same time. I can go to the green button here and you can see I can enter full screen or I could tile to the left side then select calendar for the right side. Now if I go into mission control you can see i've got desktop 1 and desktop 2. In between those i've got the split view of notes and calendar and there's Safari. And by the way you can drag and drop these to put them in any order that you want. And if you were to close one then those windows will return to where they were before.
So here are a bunch of miscellaneous tips. The top part of any window whether it's the Finder or in an app is called the toolbar and these buttons here can be customized. First you may want to customize how they appear whether they appear as icons as text or both. If you control click on the toolbar you can choose to have icon and text text only or the default icon only. And notice here there's also customize toolbar and now you could add all of these additional buttons to the toolbar. So for instance if you want to have a trash button here you can add it. You can also remove it just by dragging it down while you're in this mode. Different apps are going to have different things here. Some will have very little that you can add others will have tons of additional functions that can be added to the toolbar. You can always drag this set here to reset everything to the default.
The Finder toolbar has some additional functionality because you can also drag and drop folders to it. So let's drag this folder here nothing will happen normally. But if I hold the command key down and then drag i'll be able to add it there so now I have a folder. And I could instantly access that folder by clicking there. I could also drag and drop things into that folder. To get rid of it just command click and drag away. You can also drag and drop a file there for easy access. Just remember to hold the command key first and drag the file there. So now I can instantly open up that file by just clicking there.
Files can also be dragged and dropped to favorites over here. But you have to be careful because it wants to drop them into one of these folders. But if you hold the command key down you can see how you can drag them in between folders and add a file there. And that also gives you easy access to open that file.
And here's my final tip and it has to do with using undo which is found in edit undo or command z. Of course when you're working in a word processing document or editing an image you can use command z to undo the last action. But you can also do it in the Finder. So for instance let me move this file there and let's say I want to undo that. I just do command z and it puts it back and you could do multiple undos. So I can move a bunch of stuff around I can maybe delete a file. I can rename something. And now I can just command z command z command z a bunch of times to get all of that stuff back.
Hope you found some of these tips useful. Thanks for watching.
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LIST OF TIPS
1. Clean Up Icons (00:20)
2. Clean Up By (00:35)
3. Finder Views Button (00:46)
4. List View Open Folders (01:02)
5. List View Open All (01:12)
6. List View By Keyboard (01:22)
7. List View Sorting (01:43)
8. List View Move Columns (01:56)
9. List View Add Columns (01:59)
10. List View Resize Columns (02:08)
11. Column View By Keyboard (02:12)
12. Column View Widths (02:26)
13. Column View Default Width (02:30)
14. Column View Auto Size (02:36)
15. Finder Previews (02:44)
16. Finder Path Bar (03:05)
17. Finder Status Bar (03:10)
18. Finder Get Info (03:17)
19. Finder Inspector (03:31)
20. Inspector Multiple Files (03:45)
21. Go Enclosing Folder (03:53)
22. Jump To Folder Above (04:02)
23. Go Menu (04:09)
24. Go Menu Library Folder (04:31)
25. Show View Options (04:46)
26. List View Icon Size (04:54)
27. Calculate Folder Sizes (04:57)
28. Icon Size (05:07)
29. Icon Text Size (05:10)
30. Icon Label Position (05:14)
31. Finder Window Background (05:17)
32. Column View Hide Icons (05:24)
33. Gallery Thumbnail Size (05:34)
34. Rename File (05:38)
35. Rename Including Extension (05:51)
36. Compress a File (05:56)
37. Compress Several Files (06:10)
38. iCloud Folders To Favorites (06:21)
39. Customize Finder Favorites (06:41)
40. Drag and Drop To Favorites (06:56)
41. Copy and Paste Files (07:06)
42. Copy and Move Files (07:27)
43. Finder Default Location (07:38)
44. Finder Sidebar Defaults (07:55)
45. Finder Sidebar Locations (08:08)
46. Trash Shortcut (08:16)
47. Trash Put Back (08:27)
48. Folders On Top (08:50)
49. Find Default Scope (09:15)
50. Search Multiple Criteria (09:46)
51. Search Any All None (10:02)
52. Search Other Attributes (10:23)
53. Skip the Trash (10:43)
54. Finder Tabs (11:08)
55. Drag Between Tabs (11:21)
56. Finder Tab Overview (11:33)
57. Spring Loaded Folders (11:50)
58. Dragging Windows (12:09)
59. Resizing Windows (12:43)
60. Resizing With Option (12:59)
61. Resizing Double Click (13:14)
62. Maximize Window Size (13:32)
63. Window Snapping (13:59)
64. Move Window To Half (14:30)
65. Restart Now (15:06)
66. Quick System Info (15:25)
67. Force Quit Finder (15:36)
68. Help Menu Search (15:53)
69. Help Menu With Keyboard (16:23)
70. Show Clipboard (16:37)
71. Close Windows When Quitting (16:48)
72. Wallpaper Tinting (17:19)
73. Sidebar Icon Size (17:31)
74. Menu Bar for Full Screen (17:43)
75. Hide the Menu Bar (17:59)
76. Dock On the Side (18:13)
77. Dock Recent Applications (18:24)
78. Customize the Clock (18:37)
79. Announce the Time (18:50)
80. Hot Corners (18:57)
81. Hot Corners With Modifiers (19:18)
82. Set Siri Voice (19:28)
83. Set Language Per App (19:45)
84. Screen Zoom (20:07)
85. Reduce Transparency (20:37)
86. Increase Contrast (20:49)
87. Menu Bar Text Size (20:56)
88. Flash Screen Alert (21:02)
89. Type To Siri (21:12)
90. Silence Siri (21:28)
91. Add Keyboard Shortcuts (21:46)
92. Change Keyboard Shortcuts (22:28)
93. Text Replacements (22:40)
94. Emoji Replacements (23:03)
95. Set Main Display (23:33)
96. Content Caching (23:51)
97. LaunchPad Shortcut (24:27)
98. LaunchPad Fastest Launcher (24:50)
99. LaunchPad App List (25:20)
100. LaunchPad Folders (25:42)
101. Spotlight Options (26:04)
102. Spotlight Calculations (26:30)
103. Advanced Calculations (26:37)
104. Math Functions (26:47)
105. Unit Conversions (26:54)
106. Currency Conversions (27:17)
107. Spotlight Weather (27:30)
108. Spotlight Sports Results (27:52)
109. Spotlight Stocks (27:58)
110. Spotlight Flights (28:03)
111. Spotlight Locations (28:10)
112. Spotlight Wikipedia (28:20)
113. Recenter Spotlight (28:41)
114. Add Apps To the Dock (28:59)
115. Remove From the Dock (29:17)
116. Rearrange the Dock (29:20)
117. Add Folders to the Dock (29:24)
118. Add Files to the Dock (30:01)
119. Add Widgets (30:13)
120. Month Widget (30:30)
121. News Topic Widget (30:34)
122. Note Widget (30:40)
123. Widget Options (30:47)
124. Control Center (30:56)
125. Control Center to Menu Bar (31:09)
126. Arrange Menu Bar Icons (31:25)
127. Remove Menu Bar Icons (31:30)
128. Typing Accents (31:35)
129. Type Emoji and Symbols (32:00)
130. Search for Emojis (32:10)
131. Option To Move By Word (32:24)
132. Shift To Select Text (32:37)
133. Forward Delete (32:45)
134. Autocomplete Words (32:57)
135. Two Spaces For Period (33:15)
136. Text Transformations (33:29)
137. Find Again (33:43)
138. Speak Text (33:55)
139. Dictate Text (34:09)
140. Hyphens and Dashes (34:30)
141. Desktop Clean Up (35:02)
142. Desktop Clean Up By (35:17)
143. Desktop Stacks (35:24)
144. Desktop View Options (35:44)
145. Safari Favorties Bar (36:01)
146. Favorites Bar Folders (36:24)
147. Open All In Tabs (36:42)
148. Tab Groups (36:58)
149. Reader View (37:30)
150. Reading List (37:56)
151. Websites Preferences (38:16)
152. Websites Autoplay (39:02)
153. Picture-In-Picture (39:20)
154. Safari Translation (39:45)
155. System Translation (39:57)
156. Private Window Login (40:07)
157. Safari Search Engine (40:41)
158. Show Web Page Address (41:11)
159. Contacts Map Locations (41:24)
160. Phonetic Names (41:50)
161. Printing Contact Lists (42:05)
162. Export Contacts (42:23)
163. Reminders Tags (42:35)
164. Tag a Whole List (42:59)
165. Export Reminders (43:14)
166. Lock Notes (43:28)
167. Float a Note (43:54)
168. Activity Monitor (44:19)
169. Activity Dock Icon (44:38)
170. Preventing Sleep (44:48)
171. Mail Dock Unread Count (45:09)
172. Reply Quoting (45:32)
173. Mail Default Signatures (46:05)
174. Image Attachment Size (46:30)
175. Previous Recipients List (46:56)
176. Notifications Muting (47:22)
177. Notifications Preferences (47:44)
178. Badge App Icon Number (48:12)
179. Notifications Grouping (48:43)
180. Focus Modes (49:02)
181. Trackpad Gestures (49:32)
182. Tap To Click (50:02)
183. Silent Clicking (50:11)
184. Notifications Gesture (50:17)
185. Multitasking Gestures (50:33)
186. Mouse Gestures (50:47)
187. FN Key Settings (51:05)
188. System Preferences Access (51:49)
189. System Preferences Search (51:58)
190. Screenshots Shortcuts (52:16)
191. Markup Screenshots (53:06)
192. Mission Control (53:23)
193. Full Screen Apps (54:07)
194. Split View  (54:27)
195. Tool Bar Modes (55:03)
196. Customizing the Toolbar (55:26)
197. Folders In Finder Toolbar (55:57)
198. Files In Finder Toolbar (56:20)
199. Files In Finder Sidebar (56:29)
200. Undo In the Finder  (56:45)

Comments: 9 Responses to “200 Mac Tips And Tricks”

Razvan Mihai

2 years ago

Gary, thank you for this truly Mac tips marathon! Is there an easy way to open a new Finder window in the same path as the previous window? I use Copy Path, Open a new Finder window, Go To Path, Paste and Hit Enter.

Gary Rosenzweig

Razvan: I can't think of an easy way to do this. But WHY do you want to do that? If I knew your goal here, maybe I could suggest something. I can't think of why you would want two Finder windows showing the exact same thing. Understanding the WHY is very important when answer tech questions.

Instinctively, I need such a feature when moving files around a certain Project Folder. Your WHY question prompted me to research this topic further. Right-clicking a Finder window will open the Context menu with Open in a New Window. Alternatively, Command Double Clicking the Folder gives the same result. The new open window will be slightly different depending on which view you are on: List (opens a new window with subfolder) or Column (opens new folder window). Thanks for the "WHY"!

Razvan: Not sure which Finder view you are using now, but I need to move things around under the same main folder, I use List View. It allows me to see inside multiple folders in a single view.

Gary: I see what you mean. Clicking the tiny arrow in front of the Folder name collapses the folder. This is very helpful. Thanks a lot!

Kynn Wilson

These are tips for macOS Monterey. Do you recommend (not) upgrading to Big Sur?

Kynn: Monterey is the latest version of macOS. Big Sur is the previous version from 2020.

Carolyn Molder

Gary, My Mac is very slow after moving up to Monterey. Could there be junk files that need to be deleted? If so how is the best way to do that.

Carolyn: How long ago did you update? Keep in mind the first few hours things are slow as the update completes and initial indexes and backups run. Make sure you let your Mac sleep (don't shut down) so it can perform maintenance while you aren't using it. If it has been longer, I would start to investigate why. "junk files" aren't really a problem unless maybe your drive is almost full. See https://macmost.com/10-ways-to-speed-up-a-slow-mac.html for other ideas.

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200 Mac Tips And Tricks

Comments: 9 Responses to “200 Mac Tips And Tricks”

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