10 Tips To Customize Control Center On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to customize the Control Center on your Mac. 

A new feature that you have in macOS Tahoe and beyond is the ability to customize the Control Center on your Mac. Control Center is this little button here in your Menu Bar. When you click it you get a variety of controls that appear underneath. Many of these controls appeared in the Menu Bar itself in previous versions of macOS. Control Center is Apple's solution to giving you more controls here without taking up more space. 

Now previous to macOS Tahoe you could customize this somewhat by going into System Settings. But now starting with macOS Tahoe you can actually customize this right here with Control Center open using this button here at the bottom. Just click Edit Controls and you are going to enter this special mode where you can Drag & Drop to change what is in Control Center. If you customize widgets before this will look familiar because it is basically the same kind of mode. You've got a list of categories here on the left. You've got the items in each category here on the right. You can see Control Center over here and you can Drag from one to the other or use these Minus buttons to remove things and Plus buttons to add things. 

For instance if I want to have a button in Control Center to start the Stopwatch I can simply drag this to that spot and drop it there. If I want to remove something I can click the Minus button and it is removed. I can also click the Plus button here and have the option to add to Control Center or add this item to the Menu Bar here at the top. So this mode also acts as a way to customize the Menu Bar at the top right. Also in this mode if you Control Click, right click or two-finger click anyone of these controls that is already there you can change its size and if there are any other options you can access them here as well. 

Once you've customized things to your liking you can just click Done here and this locks everything into place for Control Center. But you can still actually customize things even without bringing up those special controls. For instance if I Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on an item here I can change its size, place it in the Menu Bar, or remove it from the Menu Bar as well, or remove it from Control Center all without going into that special mode. 

Now that you know the basics for editing Control Center on your Mac here are ten tips for how to use this. First use this to clear space in your Menu Bar especially if you are on a MacBook you've got limited space here on the right side and you may not have room for all of the controls. But a lot of these controls can simply be in Control Center and maybe already are. For instance if I go into Control Center I see Wi-Fi is here but it it's also in the Menu Bar up here. So I don't really need it there. So I can get rid of it in the Menu Bar. I can do that by Control Clicking, two-finger clicking on the trackpad, right clicking on a mouse and selecting Remove. Now that it is gone from there I can still access everything that that button did here in Control Center. One more click, click Control center and then click here to switch Wi-Fi on or off or click the little arrow pointing to the right here to access more options. So you can do that for other items here as well. For instance I've got Focus in both places. If I Control Click on this you can see I can also choose to only have it shown in the Menu Bar when active or Remove it completely. But here's a control that's not in Control Center at all. It's the one for Mirroring the Screen. So, I can go to Edit Controls here and I can Drag & Drop this into a slot in Control Center. You can see how it pulls it out from the Menu Bar there. I can still Control Click on it and choose to have it shown in the Menu Bar as well if I want. But the idea here is I've just cleared out more space in the Menu Bar and I still have pretty easy access to this control. 

Now as I showed you before you also have control over the size of the items here in Control Center. So you want to adjust those as needed. For instance here for Display I've got a really wide slider for Display Brightness. But if I Control Click, two-finger click, or right click on it you see I can change the size to Medium and I still have the Slider there. So I can still control the brightness pretty easily with a control that is now half the size. I can do the same thing for Sound here. Now I can Edit Controls and then put these side-by-side and take up less space here in Control Center and still have the ability to control both sound and display with sliders. Notice though if I go down to the smallest size it is just a button now which may be okay because I can still click it and you can see how it jumps to the full set of controls for the Display. So I have a slider there. 

Likewise you can make something bigger and this is especially useful for some of these controls where it is hard to see what they are based on the icon. For instance, let's add a control here for Lock Screen and there's one here for Put Display to Sleep. I'm going to drag it over here and Done. Now based on that icon can you tell what that means. Maybe you can. Maybe you've seen this icon before and you remember that it is Put Display to Sleep. But if you're not familiar with it it may be more useful to actually set the size of this to Medium and you can see that gives enough room for text to be displayed there. It takes up two slots but it probably wasn't any good in one slot if you couldn't remember what it actually did. Maybe after a little while using it like this you can reduce it back to one slot. A lot of the controls are like this giving you a hint as to what it does if you just go to the Medium size. 

Now here's the biggest tip of this whole collection.You can have more than one Control Center. So you've got this one Control Center that's always there by default and you can customize what's in it. But when you go to Edit Controls notice this little Plus button that appears to the left of it. You click that it has another Control Center. You see it automatically jumps to that Control Center which is now empty. You can set the icons. You've got five choices here. This will remain there in the Menu Bar as long as you put something in it. So, for instance, let's add Alarm & Stopwatch Controls to this and maybe let's add some Window Tiling, like that, maybe let's add Quick Note and I can Drag & Drop it in here. Maybe add a Timer right there. Then when you click Done you've now got this second Control Center here. So this is the original. This is the new one you just created. You can use Command and Drag to drag it next to it or put it in any order you want. Now you've got two different Control Centers you can get to. So you can arrange which items appear in each one maybe grouping them by what they do or how they act or just how often you use them. You can certainly go and add another one, if you wanted, as well. To get rid of one simply don't add anything to it or remove everything from it and it will go away on its own. But you can also hold the Command Key and Drag this down far enough until you see Remove and then drop it. 

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Now any Control Center you've got, including the original, will actually only display as wide as it needs to be. So let me add another one here and I'm going to add a bunch of Clock oriented things like this to it. I'm going to just leave this like that. Now notice when I activate this it comes down in just a little vertical row here. If I go in further and say arrange it like this, maybe add one more control like that, it will just be as wide as it needs to be here. So you can see how this looks.

Now let's edit controls and a new control here. i'm going to use the Star icon there and let's use this as an App Launcher. Because one of the controls we can add here is listed under the category Shortcuts and it's simply Open App. So I can drag this over here and I can choose an app for it to open. So let's say we want this one to open Activity Monitor. Done. Now let's go and add another one. I'll drag this one right underneath it and let's choose another app, like Calendar. I'll continue to add some more here. Now I've added a whole column of apps. So now I've got this little App Launcher here that just launches these apps. I can add multiple ones of these. So I can have one for one kind of app and one for another kind of app. Instead of a single column I can have multiple columns. I can fill this with apps if I want. Or, perhaps I can set these all to be Medium size so that it shows the name of each app. So now it looks like this.

Here's a bonus tip. If you Edit Controls and you've got some of these open app buttons here you can Control Click on them, right click or two-finger click and you can select Copy to Menu Bar. This puts a Launcher for that app in the Menu Bar. Now, if there isn't a button here that does what you want you can probably make it using Shortcuts. So I'm not going to go into how to build Shortcuts here. I've done that in plenty of other videos. But once you've got shortcuts that you use you can launch them using Control Center or create a special Control Center here just to hold those shortcuts. 

So if you go down to Shortcuts here you've got the ability to run a specific shortcut or to show all of the shortcuts that are in this special Menu Bar list that you used to be up here in the Menu Bar for you to choose. Now you can still add it there but it brings up a special list. Let's put that in here and I can demonstrate it. But in addition to that you can also add your own shortcut here and you can choose from your list of shortcuts. So I'll just choose from, say, some of the ones that are from the Gallery like play a Playlist, like that, or let's choose the astronomy image of day, like that. So now you can simply click here and just choose the shortcut and it will run. 

Now, perhaps the most complex of all the buttons here is one under Screenshot. Here you can have a simple button that starts a screenshot, but you can also do Custom Capture and Custom Recording. So I'm going to add Custom Capture here. When I drop it there it's going to have me customize it right away. I can give it a name. So I can name it whatever I want. I can decide am I capturing the whole screen, the selected window, or selecting a portion of the screen. Then, where does the screenshot save to? Clipboard, Documents, open up in Preview, or Show Floating Thumbnail. Then whether or not there's a Timer and whether or not the mouse pointer is shown. This Custom Capture here can then be triggered in Control Center and will follow those customizations. So if I do Shift Command 5, for instance, and I set the options here to save to Desktop, then that's not going to affect how this works because this one is set to Capture the screen and Open in Preview. The thing is you can add multiple versions of this. 

So you can have another Custom Capture, give it a different name and a different set of  settings. You can create an entire Control Center that has different capture options and destinations. Of course there is nothing to prevent you from actually using Shortcuts to create a shortcut that also takes a screenshot and maybe does even more with it. 

So you can use Control Center to really up your Screenshots game.

Now if you've been experimenting and you've customized Control Center quite a bit, maybe added other Control Centers as well, and you just want to reset it and get it back to its original state you can do that by going into System Settings and then go to Menu Bar. Then you have all these controls here in Menu Bar. But if you go all the way down to the bottom, there's a button for Reset Control Center. This will get rid of any extra Control Centers you've created and take this one Control Center and set it back to its original state. 

Now if one of the things holding you back from using Control Center is that it is pointer-based. You need to use your mouse or trackpad to activate Control Center and then to click on an item, well you can actually use the keyboard to get to Control Center. But if you want to control Control Center you're going to need to go into System Settings first. Then under Keyboard you're going to look for the Keyboard Navigation Toggle. Turn that On. Now this allows you to control lots of different things on your Mac using the Tab Key. One of those is Control Center. So to get to Control Center either way the Keyboard Shortcut is the fn or Globe Key and C, for control center. You can see how that brings Control Center up. So this could already be useful just because it allows you to see certain things. Like what music is playing for instance. Or what the volume setting is at. You can use Globe and C to dismiss it as well. 

Once you have it up as long as you have the keyboard navigation switch turned On you can use the Tab Key to get between items. Now some items don't react to this. So it's going to jump right to some of these switches here. But a lot of them do and you'll find when you make custom ones like say a list of apps or a list of shortcuts all of them will react to the Tab. So you get to what you want to control. For instance if you want the volume to go up you just get to the little Volume Up portion here and you could press the Spacebar to actually go Volume Up. You use Shift Tab to go backwards. So I can do Volume Down. But for switches you can just Tab to the switch, like right now you see the Light Mode, Dark Mode switch is selected. If I press space it is the same as clicking on it. Space again clicks again. To dismiss it you can just use the Globe Key and C again or the Escape Key. 

So Control Center is now a highly customizable tool that you can use for all sorts of different things. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.