Miscellaneous stupid Mac tricks, cool Mac tricks, and stupid cool Mac tricks Thread

[Ben_H]

Old one that I never use but have in the back of my head: option-shift- volume/brightness keys for finer adjustment.

This one goes back to the classic days and still works, command click to click on background stuff without bringing it forward.

Thanks for the reminder on this one. I used these finer controls for years, then in the 3 years I used a Touch Bar Mac they somehow completely exited my brain. It will be very useful for my M1 MBA, where 5 notches of brightness is too dim but 6 notches is too bright.

5.5 notches of brightness is the just right porridge of brightness for me it turns out.

 

[Ben_H]

An old trick but it still works. If you want more Windows-like mouse movement, you can completely disable mouse acceleration with:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

It's important to note that you need to restart for this to kick in. Also note that you have to redo this after using a Magic Mouse since the Magic Mouse sometimes overwrites this setting when you connect it (though weirdly, the Magic Mouse itself will work during that session without acceleration. it's just that the next time you go to restart your Mac there may be mouse acceleration again).

You can also disable trackpad acceleration by replacing "mouse" with "trackpad" but I wouldn't recommend it. Apple's trackpads without acceleration are very weird and overly sensitive the point of being almost unusable. It's very obvious they were designed to be used with the acceleration on.