You can drag and drop a document to an app in the Dock to open it with that app. But it doesn’t appear that you can drag and drop to LaunchPad in the Dock, and then continue dragging inside LaunchPad to select an app. But you can. The trick is to wait for a second or two while the document is hovering over the LaunchPad icon. Then LaunchPad launches and you can drag to the app. You can even then drag to the edges of the screen to go to another page inside LaunchPad.
Say you are viewing an image in Preview and you want to open that same file in Acorn. Instead of finding the file in Finder and opening it in Acorn, you can click and hold the icon in the title bar of Preview, then drag it to Acorn in the Dock. This works with all apps that use the standard Mac title bar on document windows.
When you open image files in Preview, they may open in the same window if you select a group of images and open them, but then if you open them one at a time they will be in separate windows. If you’d rather they always opened in the same window, or always in separate windows, you can set this in Preview, Preferences, Images.
If you occasionally see a message saying that Time Machine has needed to delete old backups to make room, don’t worry, that’s normal. Time Machine will keep backing up versions of your files and keep around files you have deleted until it fills up its hard drive. Then it gets rid of the oldest stuff first, always keeping a complete backup of your current files. But it can be annoying to get notifications. You can switch that off in System Preferences, Time Machine. Click the Options button and turn off the “Notify after old backups are deleted” option.
When printing from Preview, you can select to print All pages or From a page to another page. You can also choose Selected Pages in Sidebar. This will print only the pages you have selected in Preview’s left sidebar thumbnail list. You can select a range with the Shift key or individual pages with the Command key. Select before you use File, Print.
Some Macs come with a Backspace key. Some Macs come with a Delete key. Unless you have an old enough Mac to have both, these keys work in the same way, removing the character before the text cursor. If you are looking to delete the character after the cursor, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that. But all you need to do is to hold the FN key and then press your Backspace or Delete key to get this function. FN+Option+Delete will delete the whole word in front of the cursor.
Did you know you can get current weather conditions and a forecast using Spotlight? The results can appear quicker than even using Siri. Just use Command+space to bring up spotlight and then type Weather. Depending on other factors, the forecast may appear even before you type the whole word. You can get weather for a different location by adding “in” and the location name or postal code.
Just about any app that deals with text, from TextEdit to Pages to Safari, has the menu choice Edit, Find, Jump to Selection. The keyboard shortcut is Command+j. You can use that to scroll to the portion of the document or page that contains selected text. So you can select some text in a document you are working on, scroll to read another part of the text, and then use Command+j to jump back to your selection.
When watching a YouTube video in Safari, or most videos embedded using HTML5, you can jump around in the video timeline by simply pressing the number keys, 0 to 9. This doesn’t work if the site is using any kind of special embedded video player, but seems to work with YouTube, videos at Archive.org, etc.
You can easily clear your Safari browsing history on your Mac. But you can also delete individual history items. Go to History, Show All History. Then select an item from the list and press the Delete key on your keyboard. You can also use the Shift or Command keys to select a range or multiple items and then delete several, while leaving others.
If you are having trouble with a web page in Safari, you can always use Command+R, or View, Reload Page to see if that fixes it. But if you want a more thorough reload, add the Option key. You’l see Reload Page change to Reload Page From Origin in the View menu with the Option key held down. This reloads everything on the page instead of using cached versions of images and other elements.
By default when you two-finger swipe the cursor over a Mac Mail message in the list from right to left you get a Delete button. But if you more commonly archive your email, you can change this to an Archive button by changing to Mail, Preferences, Viewing, “Move discarded messages into.”
In Mac Contacts you select a name on the left and then view the contact information on the right. If you ever want to view more than one contact at a time, use Card, Open In Separate Window or Command+i. This opens the contact in a new window and you can continue to view other contacts in the main window. You can open as many of these windows you as like. You can even select multiple names and use Command+i to open them all at once.
Apple doesn’t always make the hard drives or solid-state drives in your Mac. So who manufactured the drive in your Mac? You can find out by holding down the Option key and choosing the Apple Menu, then System Information. Then in the left sidebar of the window that appears, select Storage under Hardware. You’ll see a list of all of your connected drives at the top. Select any one and the information below shows you the manufacturer’s name under Device Name or Media Name.
Did you get an emoji character in an email or text message and aren’t sure what it means? You can copy and paste that character into Safari’s address bar or directly into a Google search to come up with multiple results that will give you a definition.
You can jump straight from a Spotlight search to the Info window for a file. Press Command+Space to start Spotlight and search. Then use the arrows or the cursor to select a file. Then press Command+i to jump right to the file Info window.
You can use Command plus the number keys to jump to the first, second, third, all the way up to the ninth tab in the current Safari window. But a new feature in macOS 10.13.4 is the ability to use Command+9 to jump to the rightmost tab. So if you have three tabs open, you can use Command+1 to Command+3 to jump to each, but Command+9 can also be used to jump to the last tab too.
If you hold the Option key down and click on the Time Machine icon on the right side of the Menu Bar, you’ll see that the command Verify Backups replaces Back Up Now. You can use this command to verify the integrity of your backup. This can be a handy reassurance if you are about to do something like use Migration Assistant to restore everything to a new Mac.
Sometimes it can be hard to remember where a setting may be inside of System Preferences. To find things, just search. Click on the Search box at the top right, or use Command+F. As you type, suggestions will appear and preference categories will become highlighted. Click one of the suggestions to jump right to that setting.
When you use Command+Space and search with the Spotlight menu, you get a dictionary definition as one of the results in most cases. If that is all you are interested in, use Command+L to quickly jump to that definition. So Command+Space, type the word, and then Command+L to see a definition.
