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

[DovePig]

Was just setting up a new Ventura install on a new Mac, complete with my preferred keyboard shortcuts for everything (didn't use migrate assistant, needed to start fresh without old accumulated crap), when I saw fn-Q in there as a "Quick Note".

Given that System Preferences forbids manual binding of fn ("globe") key combinations, I was quite intrigued. Turns out there is a whole bunch of function key system shortcuts I didn't even know about – was that added around the release of iPadOS keyboard support or what?

Especially useful when you remap your Caps Lock to function as function key when held (the full‑size wired keyboards had fn just above del on the right, harder to reach). List I found somewhere

fn-A = Move focus to Dock (navigate with arrow keys, or (shift+)tab, spacebar, enter)
fn-D = Enable Dictation [doesn't work for me for some reason edit: seems like Dictation is just bugged in Ventura, sometimes turning off – when it works fn-D works too]
fn-F = Enter/Exit Full Screen
fn-H = Show/Hide Desktop
fn-E = Open Character (emoji) viewer [remembers last state, i.e. floating or normal window, navigation by arrow keys, great for common unicode symbols like № or ℃]
fn-C = Control Center (can't figure out how to navigate with keyboard)
fn-N = Notifications (can't figure out how to navigate with keyboard)
fn-M = Menubar (navigate with arrow keys, or (shift+)tab, spacebar, enter) [doesn't work for me] [edit: works, d'oh]
fn-Q = Quick Note [yay! that one is a winner!]

plus the obvious ones from laptops:

fn‑Up/Down = PageUp/Down
fn‑Left/Right = Home/End

Any others?

And speaking of customising keyboards, you can still create custom keyboard layouts that work systemwide, either by hand, or with something like the Ukelele app for a complete bundle with custom icon and everything. For even more control, including multi‑keys and whatever, there is still the ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict way, but that's a lot more work.

 

[DovePig]

I'd say very likely, I tried all of those on my iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, and all of then except dictation and the emoji viewer worked exactly the same as described (and on iPadOS the emoji viewer is activated by pressing just Fn by itself, so not really surprising for that).

Fn by itself for the emoji viewer is now default on Mac OS as well, but it's the first thing I changed in the prefs – I hate it when it pops up when changing volume with fn‑F12. And since I tend to use it a lot for technical symbols, glad I found out fn‑E works too!

 

[DovePig]

Small (or not so small) pet peeve for British English users – Mac OS Ventura (or Monterey) had changed a few localised names of some well‑known and grandfathered system settings names and folders.

I can live with System Preferences and Preferences changing into System Settings and Settings, even though it's a bit ugly change for no reason.

But Bin and Empty Bin? No way! As much as I like keeping my bins clean at home and prefer British English, I'd rather not be totally confused whether the Finder window shows me /bin, Trash, /usr/bin or whatever.

Thankfully, System Preferences allows you to set different localisations for different apps, including Finder and Dock. It's a bit convoluted – finding and dragging the Finder.app and Dock.app into the window in System Settings/General/Language & Region/Applications and setting them to English - English, but it works. I can live with that one Americanism of "Trash", since it's distinct from everything else that uses bin. Better than the confusion before.

 

[DovePig]

So they name the Trash to Bin, but can't name Control Center Control Centre.

Huh? It's "Control Centre" here on both Ventura and iOS – do you have the right locale set?

 

[DovePig]

Terminal:

open .
open ~/Documents

Applications:

Command-Click the file name (center top of) to be able to open the file-containing-directory

Finder:

Spacebar gives nice previews of most kinds of files

CMD‑R in any Open File dialogue in any app that uses standard dialogue system calls opens a separate Finder window right in the selected folder path (this one is pretty well known, but pretty damn useful so I am repeating it here).

Now if someone can just tell me how to snap windows next to each other and fix full screen mode (green button)

BetterSnapTool, well worth the (small) price. Or Ventura has "hover over green button to show Tile Window to the Left/Right" and earlier OS versions had long‑press of the green button for the same, but I find BetterSnapTool easier still, as it has drag areas for tiling, customisable per application.

 

[DovePig]

I never used a windows keyboard. Some old Mac keyboards had an "alt" key, which may be an AZERTY keyboard specificity.

A1243 (the aluminium wired full‑size keyboard) still has the dual markings with option symbol and 'alt' – I wouldn't count that as that "old" (being one of their best keyboards IMHO). No idea if the ANSI version has it as well, but the EU QWERTY ones do...

 

[DovePig]

Unfortunately, the Background Sound noise feature seems to be fairly bugged on Ventura. I can't ever get it to stick to on between restarts. While it might be "only" a case of corrupted preferences plist after an OS upgrade (wouldn't be the first one), it's still kinda disappointing – "clean OS install" used to be a Windows thing, not Mac...

 

[DovePig]

It's also written by Arsian @QuadDamaged

I have been running their rain and cat purring sound generators all day – came in handy in the 33℃ heat here ;-)

 

[DovePig]

I occasionally have an issue where I'll save something to my iCloud Drive on my phone or iPad, but it doesn't show up on my Mac because it has decided to stop syncing iCloud Drive, and the only way I could figure out how to restart it was a reboot, which is annoying. Today I discovered that "killall bird" in a terminal unclogs whatever wasn't working, and my iCloud Drive instantly synced!

That's a bit... nuclear, nuking the cloud daemon like that (even if it works for you). You may want to try Howard's suggestions or tools first.
https://eclecticlight.co/2023/07/24/how-to-fix-problems-with-icloud-and-icloud-drive/Also, you might want to try using SIGQUIT instead of SIGKILL, would be a bit cleaner. (see Jonathon's reply below)

 

[DovePig]

Just killall bird by itself (without a -9) is going to send a SIGTERM; that's a perfectly fine way to cleanly kill a process (and is how launchd is going to terminate it if you reboot or stop the service with launchctl).

Don't send SIGQUIT; that will usually trigger a core dump and make the crash reporter dialog pop up, and whatever you're terminating might not clean up after itself (or may not clean up as completely).

Ah, sorry. I mixed them up, my bad. Should teach me not to post before the morning coffee...

 

[DovePig]

Safari 17 in Ventura and Sonoma added Favicons to the Favourites bar.

I just discovered that you can customise them two ways by renaming the bookmark:

• if you want just the Favicon without any text, you can use some "invisible" Unicode characters instead of the bookmark name. INVISIBLE TIMES, INVISIBLE SEPARATOR and INVISIBLE PLUS all seem to work. Then it shows you just the favicon and a very short space next to it.
• if you want just the Favicon, but customise it, you can use Emoji instead. Then it shows only the emoji, without the favicon. Works for me for Google Maps – or is way better than Google's generic favicon anyway.

 

[DovePig]

I'm not 100% sure this is the right thread, but it is both cool and very stupid: Flappy Bird implemented in Finder.

Can't wait for a 0‑day of that

 

[DovePig]

So did anyone else all these years never realize you could select and then drag/drop multiple tabs in a browser just by using command and shift like normal, but for tabs?? Just me?

All those years?!? Wasn't that a feature only added this fall with Safari 17?

 

[DovePig]

Weird - I suppose it might be, particularly since employers pay service industry crap so they have to scrabble for tips to make a living in the US.
View attachment 70948

It would be a hard button to miss. Here's the support page for it: https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/calculator-apdc0baea711/watchos

"Note: The Tip feature is not available in all regions."

It's a bit weird that the support page shows the tip button even in other locales like German or similar, localised ("Trinkgeld"), some of which are not exactly countries where service workers have to always scrabble for tips like in the US (though tips are still definitely appreciated there). Could be just common renders, though. And Apple's localised features are sometime weird that way.

 

[DovePig]

Might not be the best thread to post this, but plenty of Mac users watch this, so...

Per my firewall notifications, Mail.app in Sonoma 14.3.1 (and a few previous versions as well) now tries to download remote content even with Block All Remote Content set to on in Mail preferences...

Seems to apply only to mails in the inbox, not spam, but it's still quite concerning.

Every time it downloads a new email into the inbox, if that email contains any remote content, I still get a fucking allow/block notification from my LittleSnitch firewall showing the Mail.app trying to contact some random servers if the message contains any remote content – from fonts.googleapis.com to others.

Expected behaviour with Block All Remote Content On would be no background loading and zero connections to anything but the mail server...

I guess it might be a bug or mismatch between all the privacy options in Mail.app

1. Protect Mail Activity – loads remote content randomly in background for inbox mails, but through a privacy VPN, preventing "just viewed it" privacy attacks. Includes #2.
2. Hide IP Address – additional option if the #1 is deselected, and just routes all through a privacy VPN, but no random background loading, so not preventing "just seen it" attacks.
3. Block All Remote Content – should block everything, but it apparently doesn't, at least with #2 selected as well.

I had the above options set as 011, BTW.

My firewall only allows unrestricted access to Apple's and my mail servers, so I was pretty pissed at seeing connection attempts to remote content even though I explicitly set Mail to block all of them. Mind you, that doesn't apply to spam folders, as any messages going straight to spam don't trigger connections. But inbox ones still do.

Filing a feedback and a bug report with my dev account, as that behaviour is certainly not normal, but ya'll might want to look into it as well. I haven't really bothered with spinning up a clean Sonoma Virtual Machine yet to check whether that's just some corrupted plists on my install (which would be bad enough), or a Mail.app bug overlooked all the way.

 

[DovePig]

I use Preview a lot for screenshots - create a new file from the clipboard, and the basic editing and cropping tools are fine. Certainly, a lot less aggravation and bother than spinning up the behemoth that is Photoshop, just to trim a screenie!

No need for going through Screenshot to clipboard > Launch Preview > New from Clipboard > Markup > Save As all manually, you can just make a Shortcut for taking screenshots...

I have one pinned to my Dock that goes:

1. Screenshot selected area
2. Markup screenshot (allows you to add text, pointers, crop, almost everything Preview does, using the same Markup engine as Preview without launching Preview)
3. Resize and convert to PNG (or JPG, even allowing you to delete metadata for privacy, as otherwise the JPG carries a bunch of PII metadata like your monitor brand and model et cetera)
4. Save as ~/Pictures/Screenshots/TMP.PNG with overwrite (so I can just screenshot something for quickly sending to somebody, without it cluttering my other screenshots I'd like to keep archived)

The nice part is that you can even invoke some other apps' functions seamlessly, without actually launching the big app itself, if it supports Shortcuts (or more precisely Mac OS Extensions I guess). Above, I am running a function from Pixelmator Pro inside the shortcut, without ever waiting for the full app to load. But that's just an example, you can do the resizing and PNG conversion / metadata removal with built‑in functions as well.

If you ever find any nicer image annotation / markup app that supports Shortcuts, you could possibly add that as well, instead of using the built‑in Markup function.

 

[DovePig]

Here's one I just found by accident: doing a three/four finger swipe down on a dock icon will trigger App Exposé the same way it does when you do it with the active window. So, for instance, if you're in Safari and swipe down on Word, it'll open exposé for Word, even though it's not foregrounded. The nice thing is that the app doesn't even have to be running, but will still show the exposé list of recently opened documents (provided that the app makes use of "Show Recents").

The same works with any mouse with a scroll wheel. Which kinda drives me nuts when I move the pointer down to the dock by accident when scrolling a long document with a Logitech mouse in a freewheeling mode...

 

[DovePig]

Screenshots via keyboard shortcuts:

After you initiate screenshot mode via that, pressing [space] switches between "select an exact area" and "screenshot the whole window under cursor" modes.

It even adds the cute little rounded window bezels to to the alpha channel...

 

[DovePig]

That also works with any other keyboard shortcuts for Exposé (Mission Control), Show Desktop or Spaces.

In fact, you don't have to use keyboard shortcuts at all – just drag the file into top of the screen, Mission Control appears after a second or two. Drag the file into the app window you want and hold it, MC shows that app's window after a sec or two and now you can drop it into it normally. Though keyboard is faster, of course.

 

[DovePig]

Mac OS Sequoia, the window tiling and snapping feature:

Apart from the keyboard shortcuts that are really handy (already covered on Ars, fn+ctrl+arrows et cetera), I totally missed one setting to maximise the windows to full screen estate without the bothersome margins around it. Big thanks to Jonathon for bringing that obscure setting to light:

There's a setting for that-- "Tiled windows have margins" in Desktop & Dock settings.

With that setting on off, no more ugly window margins wasting screen space when snapping or tiling windows in Sequoia! No idea how I have missed that one, but it was a pet peeve of mine right after the upgrade. Glad the option is there.

 

[DovePig]

I spent so much time going back and forth on that option. If I manually resize a window, I need the edges to be flush, but I weirdly like the margins when tiling.

Although I don't really get you – window edges should be flush, all the time!!! ;-) – you can still have both. Turn the option on and manually resizing still works to flush edges, while snap‑tiling keeps the margins. It even seems to remember the flush edge size prior if you drag the window upwards to restore the previous size.

 

[DovePig]

Sequoia window tiling, maximising windows by dragging them to the top screen edge has a hidden feature (well, one that previously existed, but they dealt with keeping it in a pretty clever way):

1. drag a window to the top at normal speed, it will offer to maximise the window

2. drag a window to and "over" the top at a wrist‑flick speed, it will open Mission Control, allowing you do drop the window into another Space or whatever

3. when maximised, drag the window a bit down, and it instantly resumes its previous size, even without moving vertically

 

[DovePig]

#2 is not new for Sequoia (and seems to kind of conflict with the gesture for #1; the margin between the new tiling feature and opening Mission Control is small enough I have trouble reliably doing the first).

I know, I just thought that they would remove #2 because of the conflict, but nice it was left in. Even if the margin between the two can be small, though IMHO is OK.

 

[DovePig]

It had already been mentioned in the Ars Sequoia review, but Sequoia finally added a keyboard shortcut to show the contextual right‑click menu on a selected word or file or whatever.

CTRL+ENTER.

What this means it's now really easy to correct ones' typos when just using the keyboard, as CMD+; highlights all typos sequentially, and CTRL+ENTER shows up the right‑click menu where all the suggestions are.

And it literally works everywhere where you can select a single item by keyboard, including the selected file or folder in Finder ("New Terminal Tab at folder" just by a few keystrokes instead of mousing over? Count me in!!!).

Some webpages that hijack CTRL+ENTER (Ars does) clicks might still suppress it, but that's another matter.

What's even better, you can still customise the keyboard shortcut for "Show Contextual Menu" in the System Preferences' Keyboard Shortcuts to whatever is your liking. SHIFT+OPTION+ENTER? No problem!

This was likely my most requested feature as I use keyboard much more than mouse, but invoking the contextual menu on just a misspelled word had been previously downright impossible without using the mouse. No more!

 

[DovePig]

May I kindly remind you that the infamous Notch discussion ran something like 20+ pages in a thread just over there?

Sorry, but this is a "Miscellaneous stupid Mac tricks, cool Mac tricks, and stupid cool Mac tricks Thread" thread, not the "Perpetual Random Apple Rants Thread" or the "Notch thread".

Please, by all means share your tips and tricks, including how to deal with the notch in here, but this is a pinned thread. Pinned because it can be so useful for finding random tidbits about some much less known Mac OS features, and that means any OT banter should be IMHO better be kept to a minimum. Maybe – just maybe – we should keep it that way? Without that much OT discussion derailing its main and only reason and purpose it was pinned in the first place?

Cheers

ETA: I do really get the frustration some of you might feel about the notch – it's the same frustration I feel about some of the other dumb decisions Apple had made in the past or will make in the future. I just feel there are better places to rant about it than this one, as this thread would IMHO better be kept pristine with just simple user hacks or tricks that might be not that well known. And apologies for delving into it myself.

To get back on topic, one feature I both love and hate is the mouse scroll button on Dock icons. Scroll down on any supported app and it shows you a row of its recently opened files above the dock. Unless you have a Logitech mouse, with the fancy magnetic freewheeling scroll wheel, where it still does show you the row of file icons, but even if you have your mouse wheel freewheeling down in Safari and accidentally, just accidentally go beyond and the cursor touches the dock – imagine a freewheeling scroll through a long webpage, when you "only just" move your mouse cursor that it touches a dock icon outside the Safari window, all disappearing...

 

[DovePig]

I just tried to update a few very old Macs to Sonoma through the Open Core Legacy Patcher. Yes, quite aware of all the problems with that, but it was the only way.

The update always freaked out for some reason.

Turns out some system updates, when the automatic system update downloads are turned on, mess up with APFS snapshots, and Open Core Legacy Patcher just completely freaks out.

The solution as recommended on a Yt video (argh, I hate videos!) is to first turn off automatic updates in System Settings, then to try to update to Sequoia (or whatever was already downloaded) and immediately cancel that update'a download. Then process with OCLP as usual.

The problem seems to be with the already downloaded (or marked for download) update creating an undeleatable APFS snapshot that borks the OCLP itself. If the Sequoia update had been already downloaded, the only way seems to be to bork it the hard way by allowing it and doing a full reset by holding the power button, but cancelling the download til then works just fine. Thankfully, just cancelling the download and deleting the snapshot worked fine for me, although YMMV.

Thought I'd leave it here since some people might still want to use OCLP to upgrade their very old HW a bit, not that I'd recommend OCLP to everybody. The security issues are quite obvious when using it.

 

[DovePig]

Some new-to-me shortcuts:
Globe+C: Control Center
Globe+N: Notifications
Globe+A: Keyboard navigation in the Dock
Globe+D : Dictation
Globe+Q: Quick note
Globe+Control+C: Center window
Globe+Control+F: Fill window
Control+Shift+Globe+Left, Right, Up and Down: tile windows in various positions

There are one or two more, see my previous post

Fn-M for main menu keyboard navigation, Fn-F to switch the active window fullscreen and back, Fn-H to show desktop and back.

The basic window tiling is simpler, requires just Ctrl+Fn+arrows (though adding Shift might add a different function, it was detailed in the last Sequoia article, as Sequoia added tiling).

Though the Centre window and Fill window is certainly appreciated! Beats using the mouse, and remembers the former positions. It's an easy two‑finger ibe‑hand gesture as well – at least with CAPS set as the Fn/Globe key, which is my recommended default in keyboard settings. Nobody needs CAPS, but FN on one's left pinky is much more usable, especially on full‑length keybaords with FN above DEL.

 

[DovePig]

Anybody know a trick to mute volume by application?

For all applications? Not without a paid app that installs its own driver or similar, as far as I know (though the app is pretty nice).

Though some apps support a volume property in AppleScript, so you could just script them separately, e.g.:

# decrease volume in Music by 10
tell application "Music" 
    set vol to sound volume
    set vol to vol - 10
    if vol is less than 0 then
        set vol to 0
    end if
    set the sound volume to vol
end tell

 

[DovePig]

I think my AppleScript, which was supposed to enumerate the commands each application has, may have gone slightly wrong:

View attachment 99009

Clearly, not enough apps!

Just did a quick count, ~400 here (to be fair, some might be obsolete 32-bit). Makes me wonder how Dock handles opened apps icons overflowing?

I'll have to try that one day, though better with some lightweight custom script "apps" instead of full ones...

 

[DovePig]

To my regret, this inspired me to open my Applications folder, type Command-A and Command-O.

This is on my M1 Ultra Studio with 64GB RAM. Still waiting for the 280 applications to finish launching. To Apple's credit - they are STILL Launching. Even on a 2160 vertical screen the dock icons are barely visible.

Edit: it finished and it's surprisingly still usable. A little bit of lag, but checkout the dock.

Spoiler: Image

View attachment 99033

Curious. So the Dock just gets smaller and smaller or what? Is there ever a cut‑off or whatever? Please continue launching, we want to know

 

[DovePig]

Running Shortcuts from the Command Line/making less awful Shortcut... shortcuts:

Apple actually has pretty nice documentation for running Shortcuts from the command line. This lets you bypass opening the Shortcuts app, but the really great part is that you can create a shell script file (with a normal-sized icon), instead of having the ridiculously large Shortcuts widget waste a ton of desktop space. This makes Shortcuts a bit more similar to Automator applications.

View attachment 99123

As an added bonus, it takes a double-click to run the shell command, unlike the widgets, which obnoxiously run after a single unintentional click.

Wait, did I miss something? All my shortcuts living in the Dock use the same icon size as any other app, and behave 100% as one - including file drag & drop et cetera. You do know that you can easily put shortcuts in the Dock as apps, do you?

Or have I just grossly misunderstood your issue? That's certainly possible, of course.

EDIT: Apparently I did miss something, as you seem to be talking about Shortcuts as Widgets on the desktop, unlike Shortcuts as apps in the Dock. Nice, thanks.

 

[DovePig]

I briefly considered trying that, then realized that these six alone would put me in beachball hell forever:View attachment 100431

Nuke it from the orbit, that's the only way to be sure! Why doesn't Gatekeeper delete those viruses? /s

Though given recent Apple enshittification with Spotlight basically being broken and whatever else (vis the Apple Rants thread), I am not really sure that even nuking them would help...

Back on topic of Apple tips miscellanea:

TIL one can download the official San Francisco Apple typefaces (as in "typography", commonly and wrongly referred to as "fonts") from the Apple Developer portal, including all the various meta and media key symbols. SF Compact is the typeface used on any recent Apple Keyboards.

From 2017 on, Apple Keyboards use SF Compact (Light or Thin, I guess) as their typeface.

And before, they used the VAG Rounded (Light or Thin again) for the keycaps. A Volkswagen typeface, who'd have thought! I actually preferred that one, the 90° "one" numeral was nicer than the slanted one!

Maybe you are asking why? I am having a set of both physical keycaps and coloured keycap stickers printed (to better suit my most used apps and typing usage on various work and gaming keyboards), and I wanted my customised keyboards to look the same as the Apple one – perhaps a bit ADHD, but I'd really hate to combine a Sans Serif and Serif keycap on one key ;-)

 

[DovePig]

PSA to anybody wanting to keep their sanity, now that the is back:

Detrumpify browser extension can be easily compiled for Safari (without an Apple Dev cert, it only works with Developer mode and Allow unsigned extensions enabled).

Install XCode, download the repo and run this:
xcrun safari-web-extension-converter [/path/to/extension]
(you might want to switch the target in XCode to Mac OS only)

In other news, I just found out that right‑clicking on Safari's + toolbar button brings up a list of recently closed tabs. D'oh! How could I have missed that? Much faster and easier than going to the History menu.