Launchpad: It's More Useful Than You've Been Told

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Launchpad on your Mac. 

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Now Launchpad is one of the many ways that you can launch applications on your Mac. But a lot of people don't seem to like Launchpad and really badmouth it online. I don't get this, as nobody is forcing anybody to use it and it actually has advantages over some of the other methods for launching apps. 

One way to get to Launchpad is to go to the Dock and look for the Launchpad icon, usually all the way to the left. If you click it there you're in Launchpad. But there are other ways to bring up Launchpad as well. One is to use a keyboard shortcut. Now some Mac keyboards, particularly older ones, have a Launchpad key on the keyboard already. On mine it's the F4 key. So if I press F4 it brings up Launchpad. But depending upon your keyboard settings you're going to need to hold down the fn or Globe Key and press F4 to do that. But you could also assign another key of your choosing. So, let's go to System Settings and then go to Keyboard and then choose Keyboard Shortcuts. Now you're going to see under Launchpad & Dock, Show Launchpad. Now even if it is checked here if there is no keyboard shortcut set then you don't have a keyboard shortcut for it. Just double click here where it says None and then use the keyboard shortcut. One good option is to use Option and then Spacebar. So while Command Space is Spotlight, Option Space is Launchpad. Now when you use Option Space it brings it up. 

But there are other ways to bring up Launchpad. Another one is Hot Corners. If you go into System Settings and then go to Desktop & Dock here and then scroll all the way down to the bottom. You'll see a button for Hot Corners. Go into that and you can set one of the corners up to go to Launchpad. So I'm going to use the top right corner. So now if I just move my pointer to the top right hand corner I'm in Launchpad. I could also hold down one of the modifier keys, like Command or Option or Shift or combination of those, and then I would need to actually hold Command down while I'm in that top right corner for Launchpad to launch. This is handy if you find yourself accidentally triggering it a lot. 

Another way to do it is using the trackpad. So if you go to your trackpad settings and to More Gestures, you're going to find a gesture for Launchpad here. It's pinch with thumb and three fingers. So, in this case, I've got it turned On and you could see a demonstration of it there at the top. 

One of the main complaints of using Launchpad is that when you bring it up you have to Search for the app you want to launch and it could be on a different page. Obviously, there are not going to be enough slots here for all of your apps so only some of them are on this first page. You can see the dots here at the bottom indicating how many pages you have. You can actually click on one of the dots to jump to it. Or you can use two-fingers on a trackpad or a mouse and scroll like that. You could also use Command and the right and left arrow keys to go between the pages. So, you've got to go through all these pages, find the app that you want to launch, and then click it to launch it.

So I think the best way to use Launchpad by far is to use the Search Box at the top. In fact you don't even need to click there to use it. As soon as you bring up Launchpad type in any letters keys on the keyboard are going to go right into that Search Box. So, for instance, if I want to launch the Calculator App I can just start typing and as I do you can see it narrows things down. I've got only apps that make sense with the letter C. If I continue to type there is ca, cal, calc, and there I am at Calculator. Then I press Return and it launches the Calculator App. This is similar to using Spotlight where I can do Command Space and then type calc and then I can see the Calculator App come up. In this case it is the first hit. Right there. So it takes the same amount of key strokes to do it in Launchpad as it does to do it in Spotlight. That's not always the case for all apps. Sometimes the top hit won't be the app itself and you have to use the arrow keys to go down. Other times it takes awhile for Spotlight to actually give you results because there is so much for Spotlight to look up. Documents, webpages, emails, fonts, everything like that. 

Now you can also use the arrow keys to get to things. You don't need to use the trackpad or mouse at all. So I'm going to bring up Spotlight here and then as soon as I hit the right arrow key you can see I've now got the very first app selected there at the top. I can use the arrow keys to travel around. When I want to launch an app all I need to do is use the Return Key. So I can go here to Reminders, say, Return and it launches that app. Then combine that with Command and right and left and it gets to any page I want and any app I want. 

Now, of course, you can arrange the apps in any order you want here. Each page is a list. So it starts at the top left, it goes across, and then down with each row. So it is not something where you can place an app exactly where you want it, it's just in a long list here. Very similar to how the iPhone and iPad work. So if I want to move Safari to the first slot I just drag it over to the left and it moves it there. If I want to move something to the next page of apps, like this one, I can just move it all the way to the right and I'll go to the next page and I can drop it there. Likewise I can take this one and move it to the left and place it where I want on this page. 

You can also create folders. The way to do that is to take one app and drop it onto another, like that. Now you've created a folder. You can click here and name it and then click away from it and now you've got a Media Folder. You can drag other apps into that Media Folder. Click on it and now you've got this page inside of a page. If you ever want to get one out you just drag it out and it puts it there on the main page. You can drag these folders to other pages as well. So if you really want you can take the time to arrange things on the different pages and in folders. In addition, searching will work even if it is in a folder. So, for instance here, in this other folder I've got TextEdit. So if I search for TextEdit you can see it finds it just as easily as if it is at the main level. Folders are also useful for hiding apps that you don't want to see. If you really want to just have the main apps that you see here and maybe hide some other things, maybe things you don't use all the time or little utility apps that are put there by other things like, for instance Adobe likes to put a lot of different icons in here, you can create a folder and just hide everything that you don't want to see in that folder. Think of it as the last item on the last page if you want. 

A few things to note about the apps that you'll find in Launchpad. One is that you will find both apps that are in the top level applications folder, that's for all users. But also apps that are in your Home folder application's folder. So something you've installed just for that one user account. Another thing to know is that if you launch an app from Launchpad, or using any other method and the app is already running, it simply switches to that app. In fact some people will simply use the same technique, whether it is Launchpad or Spotlight or whatever, to both launch an app and switch to that app.

Now, of course, another thing to use Launchpad for is to Remove apps. So uninstall them. If you click and hold on any app and wait holding it down so that everything starts to wiggle and some of the apps have this little x next to them. You can also just hold the Option Key down and it will do that. So as long as the Option Key is held down you get those. Now the reason some of them don't have the little x is because they are part of the operating system. So you can't delete them. Another reason is because you've installed them outside of The App Store. So only App Store installed apps will have this x here. App Store installed apps should, for the most part, put all of the components inside the app. So simply removing it from the Applications Folder, which is what clicking on the x here does, will in fact delete the app and you won't have to worry about anything else. Apps from outside the App Store may do different things and you need to refer to the publishers documentation for how to uninstall them. It's probably just dragging it to the Trash from the Applications Folder but some of them may have other libraries that you want to delete although that is getting rarer today as more developers are creating their apps properly where everything is inside the app. 

Now another thing you should know about Launchpad is that the Dock Icon has some special properties. You see the Dock Icon here and you can just click it to, of course, launch Launchpad. But if you click and Hold or Control Click it brings up a menu. The menu is an alphabetical list of all the apps in Launchpad. So you can easily get to them. Notice how it also has folders. There is the one we created right there. So, the more folders you create the easier this will be to navigate. The alphabetic order makes it very easy to use Launchpad here from the Dock rather than the full screen version or use the keyboard. For instance, if I press F you can see how it jumps right to the F's. If I do a couple of characters like Fi it jumps right to the first one that starts with fi. Then you can just use the Return key to launch the app. 

If you ever want to reset Launchpad, get it back to its initial state, you can do so using a special terminal command. So I'm going to use Launchpad to launch Terminal and then I'm going to use this command, defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad (capitalization matters so make sure you get it exactly like that) -bool true. Now when I do that nothing will happen right away. I need to restart Launchpad. Launchpad is part of the Dock so I do, killAll Dock. Now look what happens when I go to Launchpad. I'm back to the default here. Notice there are only three pages. Everything here is setup exactly as it would be when you get a new Mac. Also notice that all the folders are gone. So there, for instance, is the TV App is no longer in the Media Folder. So everything has been completely reset. 

Here's another Terminal Command you might want to use. This one, 

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 5, that will change the number of rows to 5. That's the default. But let's say I wanted to have more rows. So let's say 7. I do that and I'm going to use the same killAll Dock to restart it and now when I bring up Launchpad you can see I now have 7 rows. You could do the same thing here with columns. Let's do 9 columns and then killAll Dock and now when I bring up Launchpad you can see it fits like that. If you ever want to reset these, then just reset the number of columns to 7. Reset the number of rows to 5 and then killAll Dock and now you're back to how it originally was. 

Here's one last tip. If you want to arrange icons there is no way, unfortunately, to select multiple icons and move them to another page. But you can Search for something and move it. So, for instance, if I wanted to move this app to this page, I can do it by being at the page where I want it to land and then starting a Search for it. As soon as I see it there, click and start dragging and now I'm still at that original page. So I can just drop it there.

So that's a look at how to use Launchpad. As I said before it is just one of many ways to launch apps. So if you prefer another way you don't have to use Launchpad. It is one of those things where you can actually use your Mac completely without using Launchpad if you like. Whereas other Mac users may like to use it all the time instead of other app launching methods. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.