MacOS UI tips

The article macOS Tidbits by Jasper Lai has dozens of tips but I’ve only included the ones below that I had either never heard of or that I’d forgotten. There are still a lot of them.

1. “⌥ + ⌘-click an app in the Dock to switch to that app and hide all other apps at the same time. This is great when screen sharing.

   “Hold ⌘ to interact with background windows without bringing them into focus.”

2. “[…] double-click and drag to select word-by-word. Triple-click and drag to select paragraph-by-paragraph.”

3. “When taking screenshots, hold ⌃ to copy the image instead saving it to your desktop.

   “When using ⇧ + ⌘ + 4 to take screenshots, press space to capture by window. In this mode, you can also:”

   • hold ⌥ to take the window screenshot sans-shadow; and/or
   • hold ⌘ to capture child views within a window (such as New/Open/Save dialogues, alert windows, et al).

4. “Any self-respecting Mac app opens the Help menu when you press ⌘ + ?.”

5. “Hold ⇧ + ⌥ to adjust display brightness, volume or keyboard brightness in quarter-increments. This is useful when the lowest click is still too bright or loud.

   “A quick way to access your Displays settings is to ⌥-press either brightness up or brightness down.

   “Same goes for Sound settings: ⌥-press mute or volume up/down.
   Again with Keyboard settings: ⌥-keyboard brightness up/down.
   (Works with Touch Bar too! ⌥-tap the corresponding button in the Control Strip.)”

6. “In Finder, hold ⌥ to Get Info on all selected items in one Inspector window, rather than in a barrage of individual Info windows. This also works with ⌥ + ⌘ + I< (instead of ⌘ + I).”

7. “You may already know about the Go to Folder… menu item (⇧ + ⌘ + G) in a normal Finder window. This is even quicker to invoke from an New/Open/Save dialogue: just hit /. (The usual shortcut still works.)”

8. “With any standard column view (such as in Finder), hold ⌥ to resize all columns equally.”

9. “⌃ + ⏎ to right-click whatever is currently focused. (Though, strictly speaking, there’s no clicking involved here.)”

   I have been looking for this for years … but it doesn’t work. However, it inspired me to finally figure out how to do trigger the secondary mouse action with the keyboard.

   1. Open Accessibility => Pointer Control
   2. Check the box for Enable alternative pointer actions
   3. Select Options…
   4. Choose the keyboard combination that you want.
   5. I assigned ⇧ + F10 to match my muscle memory from Windows.

10. “⌘-click items in the Dock to reveal them in Finder.”