When you click and drag a title bar of a window to move it, the window pops to the front, ahead of other windows. If you want to move a window without brining it to the front, just hold the Command key down and click and drag the window. Then you can slide to behind other windows.
If you have several documents or windows open in an app, and some are behind the windows of other apps, you can bring them all to the front by choosing Window, Bring All to Front. But if you hold down the Option key, then that menu item changes to Arrange in Front. This brings all the windows to the front, but also centers them, with each window being slightly to the right and down from the one behind it so you can see them all and select any one.
When you take a screenshot with Mojave using Command+Shift+3, 4 or 5, you get a thumbnail of the image in the lower right corner for a few seconds. This can be handy if you want to access the image by clicking it, without needing to find the file. But if you’d rather not have the thumbnail, you can turn it off. Use Command+Shift+5 and then click on the Options button that appears in the controls. Then uncheck Show Floating Thumbnail.
Want to launch an app? Use LaunchPad, but without using LaunchPad. Instead of clicking on the LaunchPad icon in the Dock, click and hold, or Control+click, the icon and a list of apps appears. Now use the cursor or the arrow keys and the Return key to launch an app from the list. No need to actually enter the LaunchPad interface. You can even press a letter on your keyboard to jump around in the list.
If you often find yourself with many webpages open in Safari on your iPhone, you don’t have to close them all one-by-one. You can tap and hold the tabs button which looks like two overlapping squares. Then the option will appear to Close All X Tabs.
If you select a file in the Finder, and use Command+i to bring up file information. there is a field for comments. You can put anything you wish there. When you search for files with Spotlight or in the Finder, you can search using words in those comments.
If you have a lot of tabs open in Safari, you can search though them to quickly find the tab you need. First, enter Tab Overview mode with View, Show Tab Overview or Command+Shift+\ (backslash). Then use Edit, Find, Find or Command+F to open the search field. Now type a keyword to search the titles of the tabs. You’ll also get results from your other devices if you are using iCloud.
Need to view more than one note at a time in the Mac Notes app? Select a note and then choose Window, Float Selected Note. It will open in another window and you can still view different notes in the main window. You can open as many windows as you like to compare or manage the information in your notes.
If you opt to use content blockers, but find they interfere with a website you are visiting, you can turn them off for just that site. Choose Safari, Settings for This Website. Then uncheck Enable Content Blockers. You can also access this by Control+clicking on the address field, or add the Website Settings button by customizing the Safari toolbar.
You know how you can click and drag the dividers between columns and sidebars in Mail, Safari and the Finder? If you ever want to get back to the exact default column width, simply double-click the divider line.
Next time you need to look up a phone number or email address of a contact, use the Spotlight menu instead of launching the Contacts app. Just a quick Command+Space and start typing the name of the contact and you get the basic information right there. You can roll over a phone number or email address and click on a button to the right to send a message or email. You can also just press the Return key to open up Contacts right to that person for full access to all information.
The default in Safari is to have all downloads go into the Downloads folder. Many people let this folder accumulate lots of files without any organization. Instead, go to Safari, Preferences, General and change File download location to Ask for each download. That way you need to file away downloads immediately.
A minor addition to the Mail in Mojave is a Emoji button to the toolbar. It appears when you are composing a message and brings up a control panel to allow you to select or search for Emoji and other characters to add to your messages. It looks like the classic smiling face emoji. In fact it is the same control panel that comes up when you use the default Control+Command+Space keyboard shortcut that has been around for years.
A new feature in Safari 12 is the ability to see website icons in tabs. Turn it on by going to Safari, Preferences, Tabs and then check Show website icons in tabs. Then when you see the tab headings visible at the top of the Safari window, you’ll see the icons along with the site name.
A small but useful new feature in iOS 12 is the ability to position the cursor in text using a trackpad-like function. When you are typing text, whether it is in Pages, Notes, Mail, or whatever, you can tap and hold the spacebar and after a second the keys go blank and you can drag the cursor around like you are using a trackpad. This works on both iPhones and iPads, but iPads have had a slightly different trackpad function in the past.
Is the default size of text in the Mac Notes app too small? You can change it in Notes, Preferences. You can also change it in iOS by going to Settings, Display & Brightness, Text Size. But this also changes the size of text in many other apps as well.
In Safari, you can see where a link on a page goes before you click it. Just hover your cursor over the link and look at the bottom left corner of the Safari window. If you don’t see the URL appear there, then check to make sure you have the Status Bar turned on by going to View, Show/Hide Status Bar. But keep in mind that if the site uses a URL shortener or link service that you may not be looking at the final destination.
Ever wonder what this little dots at the bottom of the Mac Dock represent? They indicate whether an app is currently open. Since apps can be open, but without any document window open, it can be useful to see that. However, if you’d rather the dots not be there, you can disable them in System Preferences, Dock, “Show indicators for open applications.”
You probably know you can use Command+Option+Esc to bring up a list of all apps, select one, and force it to quit. But you can also simply double-click on an app in this list to switch to it. So you can use it as an application switcher, with the advantage being that the list is alphabetical.
Since you talk instead of type to communicate with Siri, it is an ideal way to find out the spelling of a word. Just ask Siri on your Mac or iOS device: “How do you spell daiquiri?” Not only will you see the result, but Siri will spell it out for you.
