Customizing and Using Control Center on Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using and customizing the Control Center on your Mac. 

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So Control Center on your Mac is something that you see at the top right corner or your screen. It looks like two switches, one Off and one On, and if you click it you get Control Center. Control Center is a collection of buttons and controls, things years ago would all have been found individually in the Menu Bar. But now they are combined into one Menu Bar item here in Control Center. 

So, for instance, previously you may have had a Sound item here at the top of the Menu Bar. But now you've got that in Control Center and you could see a Sound Control here. The same thing for Display Brightness. You've got control for Wi-Fi, Blue Tooth, Air Drop, Focus Modes, Stage Manager, and Screen Mirroring. You also have an Audio Control, in the case for the Music App. You also find at the top here a Privacy Indicator showing you what, if anything, is using your Camera and your Microphone. So in this case I see here that I'm recording for this screen recording here and it shows me what is using each device. Also note that you'll see a colored dot appear next to the Control Center icon there at the top indicating, of course, that the microphone and/or camera are being used right now. You can click in Control Center to see what exactly is using them. 

Now note the items here are in Control Center are the same as what you would find if you had them up here in the Menu Bar. For instance I've got Wi-Fi in both places right now. Notice here if I click here, where it says Wi-Fi or even where this little right arrow indicator is, I get my Wi-Fi controls. Now if I were to click here in the Menu Bar I get the same Wi-Fi controls. So it is two different ways to access the same thing. But having Control Center makes having it in the Menu Bar here redundant except for the fact that I can see my Wi-Fi signal strength really easily without having to click anything. So that is why you may want to have it in both places. But if you're short on space you may simply want to remove it from the Menu Bar here. The easiest way to do that is to Hold the Command Key down and then drag it down. You can see I can remove Wi-Fi from the Menu Bar but I still have the indicator here in Control Center with the signal strength and access to all of the functions. 

It is the same for a lot of these other things here. I could have versions of them all here in the Menu Bar. But instead I've got them just in Control Center to save space in my Menu Bar since I don't need to access these all the time and it is worth the one extra click to save the space. 

If you want to move something from here to the Menu Bar you can. All of these are draggable. So for instance if I wanted to have sound up here in the Menu Bar I could actually open Control Center like this and then drag Sound into the Menu Bar. Now you see when I click Sound here I go into my Sound Controls and I get the same Sound Controls when I click here in the Menu Bar. Then to get rid of this I'm going to Command drag down to get rid of it. 

Now there is a more comprehensive way to customize what is here in Control Center. That is to go to System Settings and one of the primary categories is Control Center. If you look here this is divided into three sections. The first section is Control Center Modules. These are things that will always appear in Control Center. But you could also choose to have them shown in the Menu Bar as well. 

The second section is Other Modules. These are things that can be in either the Menu Bar or Control Center or both. So you've got a set of switches. For instance Accessibility Shortcuts I can have in the Menu Bar. I can have it in Control Center so now you can see it appear here as a button. Or I can have it in both places. 

The third set here are for things that only appear in the Menu Bar. They will never appear in Control Center. So the Clock, the Spotlight button, the Siri button, and a Time Machine button. Also notice that this means there are a lot of different things you can put in Control Center that aren't there by default. For instance there is the Accessibility Shortcuts button, there's the Hearing button which is another set of accessibility features, and there is Fast User Switching. You can have that in Control Center as well. If I was using a MacBook I would also see sections here for a Battery Indicator and if my MacBook had it a Keyboard Backlight Control. So you can see how these are all just added as buttons here at the bottom. But if I were to click one then it behaves just as if it was coming down from the Menu Bar on its own. So if you prefer Switches and Menus to customize the Control Center use this section in System Settings. 

Now note that a lot of controls here function differently depending upon where you click them. For instance here with Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, and Air Drop if I click on the name or the little arrow to the right then it drops down into More Information, a deeper menu there. If instead I click on the little icon it is just an On/Off switch. The same thing here for Display. I've got a Display Brightness control that I could use. But I can also click up here or by this arrow and it will dig down further into all of the Display controls. You can see the same thing for Sound here and for Music as well. It will show me a more detailed Music control here including the song that is currently playing and the ability to skip forward and back and all sorts of things. So most of these things can be used as a direct control here in Control Center or just a way to dig down deeper into the settings for that particular item. 

One last thing I want to show you is you can get to Control Center with just the keyboard. If you use the fn or Globe Key and C it brings up Control Center. Now normally this doesn't do much else besides bring it up. You now have to use your trackpad and mouse to move the pointer to control things. But it can be useful to see, say, your Wi-Fi strength or whether or not you've got BlueTooth or Air Drop turned on. You can use the same keyboard shortcut to Dismiss it. You can also use the Escape Key to dismiss Control Center. You can somewhat use the Keyboard to control things in Control Center if you go into Accessibility under Keyboard, turn-on Full Keyboard Access. Now when you bring up Control Center, I'll do it with the keyboard here, then you see I can actually use the Tab Key to move between items here. Of course this means you have to have Full Keyboard Access on all the time and that blue box can be annoying sometimes. But this is a way to actually use it with the keyboard if you want. 

So there's a look at Control Center. If you think you've got too many items here in your Menu Bar you may want to look at what you've got in Control Center, add some things like I've added Fast User Switching here. That means now I can get rid of it out of the Menu Bar here, save some space there, and know that I still can access it but just with one more additional click to get to it. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.