Mac Basics: Using Launchpad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you the basics of using Launchpad on your Mac. 

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So Launchpad is a dedicated app on your Mac for launching other apps. You'll find it in the Dock, most likely all the way to the left next to the Finder. Click on it there and it brings up Launchpad. There are other ways to bring up Launchpad as well. For instance you probably have a dedicated key on your keyboard, the F4 key. If you press that that brings up Launchpad. Now if you have in System Preferences a certain setting in Keyboard, Keyboard, and this checkbox here set On then you have to hold the fn key when pressing F4 to bring it up. Note that on newer Macs the F4 key is a shortcut for Spotlight. Not for Launchpad. If you have a Mac with a Touch Bar then Launchpad is a button in the Control strip. There are other ways to bring up Launchpad as well that I'll get to in a few minutes. 

When you bring up Launchpad you'll see a grid showing the apps that you have installed on your Mac. You will probably have multiple pages of these apps. At the bottom you'll see dots. Here I've got three dots telling me I have 3 pages of apps. I could click on anyone of those dots to jump to that page. I could also swipe with two fingers on a trackpad to go between them or one finger across an Apple mouse to go between these pages. Another way to do it is using Command Right Arrow and Left Arrow. To launch an app all you need to do is click the icon and it will launch the app. Now you can arrange apps in any way you want in Launchpad. So to move apps around you can simply click and drag them around and move them. But it's easier if you click, wait for everything to wiggle and go into this mode and now they seem to move a little bit better and you have a lot more control over where they go. If you want to put them on another screen simply move to the right or to the left and wait and it will scroll over to that screen.

You could also group apps together in Folders. So if I take one app, drag it to another and drop it on it, it will create a Folder. You can then name that folder and then you have this little folder with those two apps in it. You can now drag other apps into that folder. The easiest way to do that is click and wait until everything wiggles even though you can drag before that. But it's easier to put into folders once everything is in this mode. So you can collect a bunch of apps so that they only take up one slot here in Launchpad. Then if you ever want to go and launch one of those apps you now click on the folder and then you click on the app. You can move apps out of folders just as easily. So just click, wait until everything is in that mode, and then drag out.

Now I'm often asked how can I remove an app from Launchpad. Well, Launchpad by default is going to show every app in your Application folder. It's not easy to have an app there but not have it show up in Launchpad. If you want to cleanup Launchpad the best thing to do is to create folders to hold groups of apps. You can even create a folder that has apps that you just don't want to see. Put them all in that one folder. It will only take up one slot, perhaps on the last screen of Launchpad, and won't get in your way anymore. 

Now one of the best features of Launchpad is the Search field at the top. So you can search for an app by simply starting to type its name. So if I type C, for instance, you'll see I have apps that have C at the beginning of the name or at the beginning of a word in the name of the app. If I continue to type it will narrow things down even more. Notice that the first item is selected. So if I now hit Return it launches the app that was selected. You can actually start using the arrow keys right away to launch an app by the keyboard. Just use the arrows to go to the app you want, press return for it to launch. But by typing you can narrow it down a lot and often you can get very quickly to a single app that's there and then hit Return to launch that app. 

So this can be the quickest way to launch apps on your Mac that aren't already in the Dock. A lot of us, including me, use Spotlight, Command Space, we start typing, the app comes up as the top hit and we hit Return. But sometimes Spotlight can be a little sluggish especially if it's an app you haven't recently launched. Using Launchpad can actually be quicker. If you hit the F4 key, start typing, and then hit Return it's the same amount of key presses but it's more reliable than using Spotlight. 

Now another important function of Launchpad is it is how you officially Uninstall Apps that you've installed through the Mac App Store. So when you go into wiggle mode by clicking and holding you'll notice some apps have an X button at the top left. These would be apps that aren't system apps and they are apps that you've installed from the Mac App Store. Not specialized installers directly from the developer. Any of these apps now you can easily uninstall by simply clicking on the X. 

So I mentioned there are other ways to get to Launchpad. One of them is to setup your own custom keyboard shortcut. You go to System Preferences and then Keyboard, and Shortcuts. Go to Launchpad and you'll see that there's a Show Launchpad Shortcut. But by default it's turned off. So turn it On and now you can set it to something. So, for instance let's set it to Command Shift and Space. So that's now the shortcut for Launchpad. I can use that to bring it up as well as using the F4 key. Another way to bring it up is to use Hot Corners. So go into Mission Control. Click the Hot Corners button. You could set a corner to bring up Launchpad. So then you just bring your cursor down to the bottom left corner, bottom right corner, whichever one you want, and it will bring up Launchpad. Note that if you hold a key, like say the Command key or the Option key, then it requires that key to be held down as well as the cursor to be in the corner.

So here's some more tips. The icon in the Dock actually can work as Launchpad without bringing up Launchpad. If you click and hold it will bring up a list of all the apps in Launchpad. You can select one to launch it. It takes a second for that list to appear. But you can make it come up quicker if you hold the Control key down when you click or two finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse. You can even then use keys on the keyboard to jump right to a section. You can see it's in alphabetical order with A at the bottom of the list. 

So those are the basics for using Launchpad on your Mac. As you can see it's a way to see all of the apps on your Mac and easily launch them even if they are not in the Dock and also uninstall apps that you've installed from the Mac App Store.