All I want is an app that can fix the "broken window" focus management. Like when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app, and when an app (say, Finder) has no window open currently, bringing it to front also unaskedly manipulates the stacking order such that other app's windows become the top most one, completely destroying the visual context. Also, back in the days I used Expose a lot to navigate, but it has completely lost any spatial determinism and usefulness for me. These issues are very noticable, and feel gross and like a team of ignorants has messed around; it's very irritating that nobody is speaking about it.
I just want a Finder that actually works. It’s pretty incredible just how bad Finder is. It’s by far the worst piece of software I’m forced to use on a daily basis.
I always feel like I'm missing something, but I find the creation of new folders really awkward. I'd like to just be able to right-click on a folder or even on a file or between two files and have it create a new folder there. But the new folder option is not available in those cases. I have to go to File->New Folder or click on the empty bottom of the screen, create the new folder there, and then drag it. Would love to hear if someone can offer tips for this.
I can use it as an orthodox file manager (with the f keys I remember from Norton Commander). I also like using it to access remote filesystems over nfs and sftp, and also S3 buckets. It also works well with Dropbox and iCloud. There is a great sync feature to keep source and target directories synchronised. It's also good for diffing directories at a glance. It's good at managing archive files too. Plus the regex file rename feature is often handy for me - I have a few presets saved for various purposes. It's also my go-to MacOS uninstaller, as it gathers the related files.
- Awkward sorting by name (mixing folders and files), unless you change the default
- Does not snap files to a grid by default on icon view, leaving some folders looking like a mess
- Not possible to figure out what's the exact path of the open folder - I just want a full path in the header/title bar. Or let me copy the full path without having to open "get info"
Sounds like you want "Show Path Bar" (in the View menu), though it lives at the bottom of the window not in the header.
The sorting by name criticism is a weird one to me though. You want it to not sort by name when you tell it to sort by name, and instead sort by file vs folder and then within those two groups sort by name?
Things that are hard: launching a terminal at a location, viewing or copying a files path, navigating a deep file system, column width in the column view, searching for files, finding file info, and lots of other.
except Excel's ribbon menu items. As far as I know there's no method to hotkey those like ALT+[<letter>] on windows. Same for Outlook's categorize email function.
Of all four, searching for files on a Mac is a dream.
Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.
And don't get me started on the inconvenience of searching for files on Linux or BSD, I mean, for starters you have to download a non-default tool like `fd` if you want to search at any reasonable speed.
This just tells me you've never used they only file search dream - Everything search, unfortunately Windows only. Spotlight has never come close to that
> Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.
I certainly agree on that, and I also find it more convenient than the desktop search options I’ve tried on Linux (there I usually drop to the command line to search).
But despite really wanting to like Spotlight, e.g. its integration with Apple Mail with email previews is great, I find it unusable for heavy work. I’ve tried customizing it to disable lots of search backends that I don’t need, but still for reasons I don’t understand, it sometimes takes 5+ seconds to process my search results before showing anything, and even the average search often takes a second and is not well-sorted.
In comparison, Alfred is always instant at searching on my computer, and I really prefer how you can explicitly tell it what you are searching for (e.g. `'filename`, `in file contents`, `=math`, etc.) whereas Spotlight tries to guess this and often guesses wrong. It’s also easier to customize if you want to integrate e.g. specific web searches in it.
I’ve tried Raycast since lots of people praise it, but I still find Alfred to have a nicer and more responsive interface, but perhaps it’s just what I’m used to.
I think something is wrong with your Spotlight index if it takes that long. Recently something went a bit funny with my Spotlight that made it take as long as you're describing, but after a reboot it's pretty instantaneous as usual. I work with large numbers of files (tens of thousands per project, with about 40-50 projects) so I don't think it can be that. I'm pretty sure there are ways to rebuild your Spotlight index.
I haven't come across issues with ordering, but my use cases are usually pretty simple, so that might be down to a difference in our workflows.
Searching on my SMB network share doesn't work. At all. It's not just that Spotlight won't index it. It's that you can't even search by filename within the current folder you're viewing.
A workaround for this (especially if you have a terminal always open) is to drag the file/folder you want to operate on into an open terminal window, which will paste in its path.
This is what I do as well. Note that nearly every MacOS app shows a file or folder icon in its title bar if you hover the mouse over it – this icon can be dragged into a terminal to open the current file or folder there. Also useful if I e.g. want to grep something in a currently open text file in the terminal, or something like that.
(There is a system setting to always show this in the title bar without hovering, which was the old default behavior before Big Sur if I recall correctly. I’m a bit annoyed that it’s now hidden away by default.)
Yes, I was thinking the same.. For several years, I'm pretty happy with PathFinder by Cocoatech: https://cocoatech.io/
The things I miss the most when I accidentically open a Finder window: Cut files wit CMD+X to move them (never understood this when coming from Windows), cycle the files in a folder (start on top if you reach bottom and vice versa) and the comprehensive info bar on the right for files and folders. Give it a try :)
I used it for years and got so fed up with its pain points, including frequent crashes, a licensing system that never worked and nagged me despite legitimate purchase, and updates which reset and lost my preferences and sidebar organization. I’m now galaxy brained back to Finder again.
I've tried some clones for mac os, but they all missed some important (at least to me) functions. Like typing not going to the command line editor, or not having a command line at all.
So it's midnight commander from macports for most complex file operations for me.
Anyone who thinks finder is the worst file browser hasn't used Windows for 25+ years. Explorer can't even search files on the hard drive of the computer it's running on.
Explorer has its thumbnail processor on the same thread as the UI so if you have a lot of pictures in a directory it'll just hang indefinitely. Sometimes if you have too many files it won't display any at all.
If explorer crashes, it's the same process as your desktop and taskbar, so that disappears too.
> when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app
Do you mean Cmd + Tab? Because this doesn't happen for me at all. When I click on a window, just that window is focused, but if I Alt + Tab to an app all those windows come to the front, which I find annoying too.
Hijacking for a quick tip I'm not sure everyone is familiar with. On macOS, most know that Cmd + Tab will cycle through the open apps. Less well-known, Cmd + ` will cycle through windows within an app.
I use https://rectangleapp.com/ on Mac and it's great. I mostly use shortcuts Left Half and Right Half, and also Maximize (Not the fullscreen mode thank God)
I appreciate that! When I switched to MacOS, I demoed both Rectangle and Magnet and found that, despite being paid software, Magnet offered a much more intuitive experience.
I'm happy to pay for software anyway, but after spending $4000 on a computer I expected such basic desktop manager features, which have been common since the 90s, to come with the package. This is not something extensions are supposed to do. This kind of crap is why I ditched GNOME.
Yea I also hate that. If i have two terminals on two screens then click on one, all the terminals are now in the foreground and blocking the IDE/whatever…
Not the OP, but I never know where a specific application will show up. Sometimes Chrome is on the left and my IDE is on the top right, sometimes it's the opposite. If it relates to the window location, I can't tell. Always mostly the same set of five or six applications, too.
- Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > <cmd>), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workflows' to make frequent tasks extremely streamlined (I use one to open LLM prompts in five LLMs, so I press command + space 'llm <prompt>' and 5 browser tabs open with the same prompt in grok, claude, chatgpt, perplexity, and (local) deepseek.
- Itsycal: an 'install and forget' calendar for your menu bar (it also uses vim keybindings to move around the calendar which is a fun yet practical easter egg)
- There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
The product is good, but there’s a lot of telemetry that I was not comfortable with given that search bar like those may see very sensitive information.
I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.
Only one AI section out of 12 total sections, and while the second section has an AI example, it's only one out of five.
It's basically Alfred with more (?) functionality. Which is basically Spotlight with more functionality. Which is basically a tool to "do stuff" from anywhere on the device.
> - There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?
+1 for magnet. Indispensable to the extent that on rare occasions I use others Macs where it’s not installed I’ll gift it to them (and they invariably become passionate about it).
I only tried the intersection of 'free' and 'trusted' (the latter being subjective, based on a glance at website/repo). I hadn't yet tried Magnet, but I see it's $5 so I'll splash out over the weekend and give it a try. Thanks for the rec! Any newb tips appreciated.
> There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.
Used Divvy for years, but switched to Moom last year and I’m very happy with it. One feature I particularly like is being able to set up “chains” of window positions to a single shortcut, so you can trigger it multiple times and it will cycle through different positions. I do miss the little grid layout window a bit, but Moom works a lot better for me overall.
I agree, aerospace is great! I'm surprised I don't hear of it more often. I'm recent convert to MacOS and was surprised at how bad the window management was by default, but aerospace fixed that right up.
I used to use tiling window managers on Linux, but I found out that my Mac usage contains lots of “graphical” apps that don't like to live in a quarter of the screen or something like that.
So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.
I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).
I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.
I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.
Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.
Why not just have all your windows fullscreen and three finger swipe between them like macOS was designed to be used. If you dont like the extremely opinionated macOS window design why not just use Linux?
I've been using the Amethyst window manager for ~10 years. It's open-source and generally works well, though it occasionally requires a restart (the app, not the OS)
I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this
AeroSpace is really nice, when it works. As soon as I use more of CPU, for example to compile something, it gets unusably slow, as in 5 seconds to do anything slow. The worst part is that the workspaces are virtual, so when you kill it, you're left with a tens of pixel-sized windows in Mission Control.
So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.
I lived with Alfred for many-many years, but Raycast seems much better this days. Simpler yet richer and constantly developed, many plugins, it's simple to do your own and... it has window manager
Is Raycast open source at all? With nearly $50M of funding (most recently $30M series B last fall) I have to wonder about the long term sustainability and whether I want to invest my time and workflows into the whims of a VC backed “free forever” plan.
Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.
It’s positively comedic that Bluesky, an entire large social network has taken less funding ($36M according to [1]) compared to Raycast (… an application launcher).
This is a concern of mine as well. Alfred is also just so ridiculously lightweight and efficient compared to, well, everything these days. At 18MB on disk and sitting at 0% CPU and 42MB RAM on my machine right now with no spread of support processes, it feels almost like an endangered species Tiger-era Mac app that’s managed to survive to the current day.
As much as I'd like to imagine investors are shoveling money into a pit because they want us to have nice software, the sheer amount of money feels like the only two options are (A) to reach profitability we're raising prices way up to juice the people who have become dependent on Raycast when it was affordable, or (B) blah blah incredible journey, our team is being acquihired for a sort of related project and Raycast will slowly wither and die as we realign priorities with the people who pay us.
I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.
Development has been slow lately, but Quicksilver[0] is still around as a FOSS alternative. We have an upcoming release that should refresh things a bit for Seqouia.
Launchbar[0] is also still around - not actively developed, but actively maintained. Happy user since 10 years already, even though I own a lifetime Alfred license.
One thing that’s been annoying me about desktop/window management is that whenever I’ve organized my windows that I need for one project on one desktop, I eventually need to upgrade vscode or warp or macOS needs to be updated. And then restarting an app it forgets on which desktop each window was running… I typically have 3-5 projects open that I switch between (and trying to organize them on different desktops has been sort of futile.)
Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?
Agreed. Spotlight search does quite well for me. I think there is a discoverability problem with native mac functionality. People tend to install lots of software that duplicates native features
> install lots of software that duplicates native features
I installed some software for key remapping and window tiling (karabiner and rectangle) when I couldn't figure out how to do it natively. You seem like you know what you're talking about; do you happen to have native recommendations?
I was using Karabiner for years just to remap caps to a hyper key. A few months ago replaced it with a launchagent to run something like this remapping caps to F19 (and using F19 instead of hyper, in hammerspoon) -- has been working great.
I have no problems with Spotlight search. I use Alfred for the plug-ins, it's extensibility, workflows, clipboard history, everything else it can do.
Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?
I'm on Sonoma (14.5). In System Settings > Siri & Spotlight,
1. I can deselect some pre-defined categories that Spotlight searches
2. I can click the "Spotlight Privacy..." button (at the very bottom right). Then I can add folders for it to ignore.
(My preference is for Spotlight to ignore almost everything, so that it isn't indexing stuff and eating CPU on this old Macbook Air. I only have it scan Applications, Calculator, and System Settings. I have it specifically ignore my entire home directory which is where all my git repos are.)
Spotlight search seems to have gotten better, while Alfred search has had me rebuild my index more than just a few times and it doesn't cope well with nested directories.
Something happened in 15.1 onwards for me where Spotlight has become way faster and way better. But yes, Alfred used to dominate in search and speed as well.
I should do a lot more with Alfred, but apart from using it as a launcher my most used feature is the clipboard search. After invoking it by typing 'clip' into the box, I get an incremental search on all clipboard contents it has tracked, and can re-copy any of those items to the current clipboard by pressing enter. Very useful and efficient when it's part of your workflow.
I have found simple hammerspoon scripts to be a great alternative to a windows manager. You can map keys to some parts of the screen. It also supports multi-display systems.
I find rectangle to be pretty good after needing a replacement for sizeup when development stopped there. My solution is to just ignore the existence of the full screen windows in favor of using the max window size shortcut to fill the current display. Then I can send a window to another display or resize it with shortcuts that are easy enough to get used to and avoid all the transitions that take seconds. The whole full screen experience is so bad otherwise, and this is from someone that is very used to the trackpad and all their gestures.
I just made my own window manager with Hammerspoon. First I copied whatever rectangle/magnet was doing and then added my own logic on top of it to fit the style I work with windows.
As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.
And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.
Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.
I’ve never used yabai or i3. I think the docs/defaults/configurations just really sold me on aerospace. yabai never really caught my eye. I’ve never seriously used Linux
I also think Aerospace was positioned as “macOS native features only” which helped sell me on it. Aka no hacks or workarounds
I'm using yabai with SIP enabled. The only thing that is missing is sending a window to another workspace. To do that I launch Mission Control and simply drag the window to desired workspace. It turns out I don't do that often so I can live with that.
I wanted to like it, but like all tiling window managers for macOS, it feels too tacked on and janky. For instance, Finder tabs simply aren't possible when using Aerospace.
I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.
Does anyone have any advice for making the most of the Dock? I find it pretty unhelpful coming from an older Windows / Linux background: I just want easy access to the windows that are open on my current workspace on my current monitor, and it seems ill-suited to that. I usually have it on auto-hide because it takes up space without providing much value.
I'm aware that I can do the three finger swipe to look at all of my windows, but that takes over my full screen and the previews constantly move location, so I can't build any muscle memory for it.
Really, I'm just looking for a classic, unobtrusive task switcher that lets me quickly navigate through what's on my screen without having to muddle through anything else (i.e. the Windows taskbar with all collapsing turned off)
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions about using Cmd+Tab or Raycast or Exposé or such, but I'm really just looking for a taskbar equivalent that doesn't require me to use a hotkey or switch "visual contexts". I want something that's persistent and shows the visible applications and their windows, and lets me click on them to raise them. A big part of this for me is being able to see what I have open at a glance, especially due to macOS's historically poor window management.
Edit edit: This is on me for using the words "task switcher" - that brings to mind Alt-Tab when I really meant to refer to the taskbar.
Install Alfred or Raycast and Command+Space your way to everything. Its 100x faster. I can launch any app in about 3 key strokes, which takes < 2 seconds and often less than a second with muscle memory.
For example cmd+space+c will launch or switch to chrome. cmd+space+py is pycharm, cmd+space+go is goland, cmd+space+fi is finder, cmd+space+me is messages, cmd+space+1 is 1Password. cmd+space+1p+space will start searching 1Password.
That launches apps. You can also just start doing math problems (calculator) by just cmd+space and start typing out a math equation. cmd+space+ai+space and just start asking a question to AI.
These only scratch the surface. But cmd+space, which is an easy modifier combo that you can do anytime, will basically unlock unlimited power. Once you get the muscle memory down you can literally launch any app in less than a second without even looking. If the app is already open, it just brings that app to foreground. Once you have that, you can use alt+tab to switch between apps that are already open. This is useful if you are just swapping between two or three apps for reference quickly. Furthermore alt+tilde (the squiggle key above tab and below escape on most latin keyboards) will switch between open windows of the same type. FOr example if you have 2 chrome windows open, it will switch only between those windows.
I also take this same approach on my phone. I'm on Android atm so I can use Nova Launcher for a completely blank home screen and then set a swipe gesture to bring up the search panel. On iPhone you can achieve similar by enabling removing everything from the home screen and using the app libary or search although it does look weird with the empty dock section at the bottom so I tended to just leave stuff like the browser in there.
I feel like I achieve the same app opening speed with built-in Spotlight e.g. `cmd+space me` opens Messages for me too, without any third party software
The dock just annoys me. I’ve been a Mac user for almost 15 years and it has never seemed useful for me. I cmd+tab or use Alfred to switch apps. To switch between windows of one application it’s cmd+`.
Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
The command-tab switcher has a lot of hidden functionality:
I always only use cmd-tab to open the switcher, then I use arrow keys to pick an application, up/down arrows to view an application’s windows (arrow keys and enter to select a specific one)
You can also hit Q to quit an application from the switcher and probably more things I’m currently forgetting.
Wait... What? That application-window trick is awesome. How have I been using been using Macs for twenty+ years and never found that? Discoverability = not-awesome.
As repetitive as these top-tips threads can be, we need one every now and again. Someone's guaranteed to learn something from them, and I'm grateful it was my turn today.
The main thing for me was the windows previews, I used to have hyperdock but stopped showing the windows previews. Right now I am trying DockDoor, so far is ok but you need to speed up the fade animation or it has some annoying behavior (reopens preview if pointer gets hover).
I find it superior to the dock. The applications on the task bar are persistent and only those active on the current desktop are shown. It handles multiple monitors too.
It has a few quirks I haven’t sorted out yet, but the overall experience is much closer to Windows 11.
Pro Tip: I use it conjunction with the dock by putting the dock on the side and shrinking the dock down to its smallest size and increasing the magnification effect.
IIRC Finder has an option to delete files from the Trash 30 days after they're put there. I just enable that option and forget about the Trash completely.
I mean, it does work pretty similar to the windows task bar? If an application is open, it is listed there in the dock with a mark under it. You can pin applications to the dock or remove them via right clicking it. Right clicking on one will provide a list the windows which are open to which you can select from, as well as a "show all windows" option which will hide everything else, and visually show just the windows for that application (you can also just force-click on the app icon to do this).
The only difference I see is that the windows taskbar provides a preview thumbnail when hovering over the icons. In which case, there's apps you can get for that.
The big difference for me is that there is no way to quickly jump between multiple windows of the same application. I often have multiple different projects open in vscode and would love a way to switch between them without having to right-click and selecting one from the list. All I want is something like the windows taskbar with auto-grouping disabled.
One Windows shortcut that I use habitually is Ctrl + left or right arrow keys and optionally with shift in order to navigate by or select entire words at a time instead of single characters.
I’ve looked into MacOS approaches to achieve the same functionality in the past, but I never seemed to find anything of use. I’m wondering if anybody here would be aware of a solution.
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Kinda like command palette for every app, I like it. Would be even better if it preselected the matching option.
Unfortunately, this is broken in Firefox – they’ve bound ⌘ ? to their help page, and it opens then immediately closes the Help menu. You can rebind it to something else (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ /) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → Firefox, menu title: Get Help.
One other problem is, it doesn’t always find the command I’m looking for. E.g. when I typed “dev”, it didn’t show “Web Developer Tools” at first. I then checked Tools menu (it was there), then tried typing it in the Help menu again, and sure enough, it found it this time.
I've never gotten this to work on an ISO-keyboard (chunky enter key).
It opens "Help" in every single app, even Apple's like Finder or Safari.
I've tried GB, German, US-International, and my default EurKey layout. None of them work. This shortcut always felt like an Alt+F4 prank to me.
Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Hold Option while resizing a window to resize from the center of the window.
Hold Shift while resizing a window to lock the aspect ratio.
When a window is inactive, use the Command key to interact with it without making it active.
If an app has windows in multiple spaces, click the app's Dock icon repeatedly to cycle through the spaces with that app's windows.
Quickly move the Dock to a different side of the screen by holding Shift while dragging the resize handle.
Press ⌘B to search the web for the current query.
Press ⌘⏎ or ⌘R to reveal the selected file in Finder.
Use the name: filter to only search in the filename.
Add kind:folder to only search for folder names.
Hold Command to show the path to the currently selected file.
QuickTime Player: Grab a single frame from a video by pausing on the desired frame (using the Left and Right arrow keys to navigate individual frames) and pressing ⌘C.
Photo Booth: Hold Option while taking a picture to skip the countdown. Hold Shift while taking a picture to disable the screen flash.
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items
This is the one feature I miss most from using macos. I got used to it back when Ubuntu used unity as its DE and called it "HUD". Didn't work everywhere (looking at you, java), but a huge timesaver.
There are so many hidden/obscure keyboard shortcuts in macOS, from time to time a post with a nice collection (and usually some hidden gems) appears on the front page here.
But I always wondered if there is a place where you can find all of them, for reference.
Huge miss in the "Native UI Conventions" which has a lot of keyboard shortcuts is that emacs/readline shortcuts are supported basically everywhere there's a text field: ^A ^E ^K ^Y opt-left/right behave as expected. Sadly no ^W tho.
I always miss that separation between command key and control key in other OSes.
For a mouse-first OS, there sure is a heavy dep on keyboard modifiers. Day to day it doesn't bother me so much, and I even like some of them, but so much functionality is hidden with no mouse-based option. Opt-Shift-V? :/
Windows does this much, much better. I can't think of a feature where you need to use the Windows key to modify the options presented in the GUI (though the Windows key has some unique shortcuts). I'm sure someone else will correct me.
Many of these features Windows has no analogue for. Consider:
> By default, clicking inside a scroll bar will scroll partially towards the clicked location. Hold Option while clicking in the scroll bar to jump directly to the clicked location.
There is no way to present this option in the GUI without cluttering up the scroll bar, so neither Windows nor macOS do so. But at least this feature is available for power users.
I admit that in places where there IS space in the UI (menu bar, right click), I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
> I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
Most likely to keep menus reasonably short and usable, which is particularly important on the smaller Macbooks and on iPads in Sidecar mode which can easily turn long menus into scrolling messes.
Also, progressive disclosure. This way allows the options to exist without overwhelming less technical users.
Writing in a text field in one window while referring to another window, where the window with the text field would overlap the other window if it were frontmost.
Here’s my tip: Messages stuck with a badge but you have no idea what’s unread / how to clear it? Ask Siri for your unread messages. It’ll go through them and remove the badge.
I'm not affiliated, but when this kind of thing comes up, I always want to share GoToFile[0].
As far as I've seen, this is the only app for Mac that doesn't just reuse Spotlight search (which I find to be terrible).
I looked for exactly this type of app for years before finding it, and when I did, it didn't seem real with the old-fashioned website and zero mentions on sites like HN. But I can assure that it works great and it's maintained. I just wish the author would promote it better so it gets more attention and isn't so hard to find.
Disclaimer: I wrote this. It's a random gist that I wrote for me but it somehow got 150+ stars. Tbh I'm not even sure how people even heard about it because I didn't post it anywhere… Either way I guess people seem to like it, so hopefully you will find it useful too!
- I love Shortcat (https://shortcat.app/). It lets you do almost anything on your screen without having to leave your keyboard.
- Also, Houdahspot (https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/) for advanced searching and file-filtering (you can even exclude results from certain folders). It has search templates, saved searches (which appear as files in Finder), and the ability to export the current search as a Smart Folder (amazing!).
I just wish that Smart Folders worked on iOS and Dropbox …
cmd+opt+shift+esc force quits the current app (cmd+opt+esc opens the force quit window, as the former doesn't work sometimes).
Cmd+q quits the current app, and, when command is held and we're cycling through apps with cmd+tab, it quits the currently selected app. If you need to quit multiple apps at once, hold cmd, press tab to select the apps to quit, and just quit them with q.
I dig these cheat sheets but wow, what a total shift in paradigm from when you had one mouse button and if a feature wasn’t discoverable then it wasn’t shipped
Just because you didn’t know about a feature doesn’t mean it didn’t ship. Why do you think those modifier keys were on the keyboard to begin with? Because many of these features have been there for decades.
I think the issue goes beyond this. I get that Apple was always opinionated and wanted to ship intuitive features. Now they lost track of the intuitive and continued with the opinionated part, which degrades the experience in my opinion.
It's interesting but also annoying because localized versions of macOS don't have the same shortcuts, or at least I cannot make them work. The main problem is that some special characters such as / are in a different key and they also require modifier keys to type them.
One of my favourite tips is to hold down Command while dragging important apps, files and folders to the Finder toolbar in order to ‘pin’ them. You can then drag files to ‘Open in…’ (eg, images to ImageOptim) or just launch apps.
My one and only tip: use AI file renaming: https://keepitshot.com. This is the app I have recently fallen in love with. It has drastically improved my file search experience with Spotlight.
I remember a launcher that was kind of bare bones and didnt use spotlight for indexing, it compiled its own index, and was able to do great fuzzy searching, but I forgot the name and cant find it, anyone else have a clue?
> Drag a file or folder from Finder into an open/save dialog to jump directly to that file.
Doesn't work consistently anymore (Sequoia 15.2). Instead of focusing on the file, it moves the file you selected from Finder to the folder shown in the save dialog. It completely breaks the workflow.
Surprisingly, it works as expected one out of ten times. It seems to depend on where on the save dialog you drag the file from Finder. Extremely frustrating!
Anyone know how to copy and paste without formatting into Outlook for Mac, without having to click the tiny dropdown box it creates when pasting formatted text? Outlook appears to have no setting for this and also ignores the key combination that works for most other apps…
> Hold the Option key while expanding an outline view to recursively expand all children.
I use this pretty frequently and it’s always a drag to find when an app doesn’t implement it. It feels so silly to be forced to manually open/close numerous items when most other apps I use can expand/collapse them all in one go.
I've used Apple's Automator app to add a new custom Quick Action which does exactly this. After right-clicking a folder, the right-click menu shows my custom Quick Action to create an empty text file.
This requires about 5 to 10 minutes to set up. You'll find instructions for this on the web or via some LLM. I've looked right now for a suitable article, but the ones I've found are subtly different from my Quick Action. I've asked ChatGPT and its instructions seem to be correct.
Switch back to windows - for me that is one of the things I struggle with on MacOS.
Creating a file at a path where I have my file explorer is so ingrained in me. It feels awful when I have to open an app then click through to save file where I want all those clicks are supper annoying because I already was in that place.
Awful thing getting current path from Finder to paste it in save dialog is also not really easy. So I am just not creating new files on MacOS.
On one hand I kind of get the idea that well you start with opening an app and then save your work and most likely it could be in default documents folder.
But years of other way I was used to work it feels annoying.
Basically I use Windows for like 30 years now and in that last 10 I use MacOs as primary OS for my personal device.
When i first moved from Windows to MacOS i was shocked there was no default shortcut to start Apps from the Dock, like Windows Key +1, 2, 3 etc. (It is configurable though)
Chrome dev tools > the three little dots at the top right of the window > capture full size screenshot.
I always look for it in the three little dots that are next to the 'x' in the dev tools drawer, but it's actually behind the dots in the top nav that show screen dimensions, throttling, device orientation, etc.
Does anyone know of a good solution to manage menubar on Mac? Have M2 Pro with a notch which hides many of many items and it's so difficult to access them unless I quit a few of them.
When the Open/Save dialog is open, hit Cmd+Shift+G to open a dialog where one can input the path as a string. Really useful when switching between terminal and GUI.
I am a cheapskate and use Quicksilver. Command spacebar, app pops up.
I hate the Finder. I used to use an app called cols that resized finder windows to an appropriate size. Stuck it in the finder toolbar. I looked for the applescript but can't find it. How tough is it to fill the finder window with all the columns so that the Magic Mouse doesn't wag the columns back and forth? Just fill the window. Cols, anyone?
You also need Fn on laptops. I just tried it. And it seems to start with focusing the apple menu without opening it, and the focus marker is hard to notice, at least in natural light where I am now.
It is weird to say, but I wish macOS had Windows 10 interface. It's incredible to me how backwards macOS is in comparison to W10, that is already deemed clunky. Finder is an abomination, window management seems like embodies ADHD, separate apps needed for basic things like direction of scrolling or switching windows...
"Hold Option while double-clicking a window's corner to expand the window to fill the screen." - this is the most important tip for macOS, IMO. I still don't understand what's in their heads that they don't maximise Safari/Preview to the full width by default.
I have 32" display and I'm using all my windows maximized, I just don't ever want them side by side or something like that.
That’s how you work, though. Having Safari fullscreen is really not great for me. Nor Preview. Actually the only thing I have fullscreen (not in its Space) is Xcode.
EDIT: I meant window maximized to fill the screen, not fullscreen, which is what option-double-clicking a window corner does.
Install the sanest keyboard text navigation bindings globally: http://xahlee.info/kbd/osx_keybinding.html
(I'd been mapping individual app configs to this for years before finding this, but the seamless OS-wide application is big upgrade)
All I want is an app that can fix the "broken window" focus management. Like when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app, and when an app (say, Finder) has no window open currently, bringing it to front also unaskedly manipulates the stacking order such that other app's windows become the top most one, completely destroying the visual context. Also, back in the days I used Expose a lot to navigate, but it has completely lost any spatial determinism and usefulness for me. These issues are very noticable, and feel gross and like a team of ignorants has messed around; it's very irritating that nobody is speaking about it.
I believe the app “Front and Center” solves this: https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/
Thanks! That's an instant purchase for me. Looks like the APIs to permit this have only been available since Ventura.
I just want a Finder that actually works. It’s pretty incredible just how bad Finder is. It’s by far the worst piece of software I’m forced to use on a daily basis.
I always feel like I'm missing something, but I find the creation of new folders really awkward. I'd like to just be able to right-click on a folder or even on a file or between two files and have it create a new folder there. But the new folder option is not available in those cases. I have to go to File->New Folder or click on the empty bottom of the screen, create the new folder there, and then drag it. Would love to hear if someone can offer tips for this.
I use Forklift instead : https://binarynights.com/
I can use it as an orthodox file manager (with the f keys I remember from Norton Commander). I also like using it to access remote filesystems over nfs and sftp, and also S3 buckets. It also works well with Dropbox and iCloud. There is a great sync feature to keep source and target directories synchronised. It's also good for diffing directories at a glance. It's good at managing archive files too. Plus the regex file rename feature is often handy for me - I have a few presets saved for various purposes. It's also my go-to MacOS uninstaller, as it gathers the related files.
Same. I tried to use Finder for a while but landed on Forklift. I consider it the best choice of file manager tools for MacOS.
What exactly is so bad about Finder? I've never had any issues with it.
- Awkward sorting by name (mixing folders and files), unless you change the default
- Does not snap files to a grid by default on icon view, leaving some folders looking like a mess
- Not possible to figure out what's the exact path of the open folder - I just want a full path in the header/title bar. Or let me copy the full path without having to open "get info"
Sounds like you want "Show Path Bar" (in the View menu), though it lives at the bottom of the window not in the header.
The sorting by name criticism is a weird one to me though. You want it to not sort by name when you tell it to sort by name, and instead sort by file vs folder and then within those two groups sort by name?
Things that are hard: launching a terminal at a location, viewing or copying a files path, navigating a deep file system, column width in the column view, searching for files, finding file info, and lots of other.
> launching a terminal at a location
Right-click on directory > Services > New Terminal at Folder.
> viewing or copying a files path
Right-click on directory or file and press Option > Copy "<filename>" as path name.
> navigating a deep file system
Not sure what you mean.
> column width in the column view
Option + click & Drag. Or do you want them to adjust to files/folders name length?
> searching for files
What's wrong with Command + F?
> finding file info
Do you want more than what is shown by Command + I or in the "details" column?
> Right-click on directory > Services > New Terminal at Folder.
Note that you can also bind a hotkey to this! And in general in macOS, you can a bind to a hotkey to any menu item in any application.
Search "keyboard shortcuts" in settings, then under Services -> Files and Folders.
except Excel's ribbon menu items. As far as I know there's no method to hotkey those like ALT+[<letter>] on windows. Same for Outlook's categorize email function.
To add to this:
cdf: aliased to cd "$(pfd)"
Doesn't really open a new Terminal, but usually, that's not what I want to happen anyway.
In the column view, adjusting to the file/folder name length is easy. Just double click on the column divider.
> searching for files
Erm, what ?
I use Mac, Windows, Linux and BSD daily.
Of all four, searching for files on a Mac is a dream.
Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.
And don't get me started on the inconvenience of searching for files on Linux or BSD, I mean, for starters you have to download a non-default tool like `fd` if you want to search at any reasonable speed.
This just tells me you've never used they only file search dream - Everything search, unfortunately Windows only. Spotlight has never come close to that
> Everything
I was going to say Everything was awesome as a file searcher except for its non-easily searchable name.
But when I checked in a raw Edge instance it was in fact the first result. Ho hum.
It's produced by Voidtools in case YMMV: https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/
> Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.
I certainly agree on that, and I also find it more convenient than the desktop search options I’ve tried on Linux (there I usually drop to the command line to search).
But despite really wanting to like Spotlight, e.g. its integration with Apple Mail with email previews is great, I find it unusable for heavy work. I’ve tried customizing it to disable lots of search backends that I don’t need, but still for reasons I don’t understand, it sometimes takes 5+ seconds to process my search results before showing anything, and even the average search often takes a second and is not well-sorted.
In comparison, Alfred is always instant at searching on my computer, and I really prefer how you can explicitly tell it what you are searching for (e.g. `'filename`, `in file contents`, `=math`, etc.) whereas Spotlight tries to guess this and often guesses wrong. It’s also easier to customize if you want to integrate e.g. specific web searches in it.
I’ve tried Raycast since lots of people praise it, but I still find Alfred to have a nicer and more responsive interface, but perhaps it’s just what I’m used to.
I think something is wrong with your Spotlight index if it takes that long. Recently something went a bit funny with my Spotlight that made it take as long as you're describing, but after a reboot it's pretty instantaneous as usual. I work with large numbers of files (tens of thousands per project, with about 40-50 projects) so I don't think it can be that. I'm pretty sure there are ways to rebuild your Spotlight index.
I haven't come across issues with ordering, but my use cases are usually pretty simple, so that might be down to a difference in our workflows.
Searching on my Mac's SSD is great.
Searching on my SMB network share doesn't work. At all. It's not just that Spotlight won't index it. It's that you can't even search by filename within the current folder you're viewing.
I agree with OP, searching for files is awful. Many times it doesn't find a file I know it is inside a subdirectory of where I am right now.
Things got much better when I moved from Spotlight to Raycast.
> launching a terminal at a location
A workaround for this (especially if you have a terminal always open) is to drag the file/folder you want to operate on into an open terminal window, which will paste in its path.
This is what I do as well. Note that nearly every MacOS app shows a file or folder icon in its title bar if you hover the mouse over it – this icon can be dragged into a terminal to open the current file or folder there. Also useful if I e.g. want to grep something in a currently open text file in the terminal, or something like that.
(There is a system setting to always show this in the title bar without hovering, which was the old default behavior before Big Sur if I recall correctly. I’m a bit annoyed that it’s now hidden away by default.)
Also, remember the commands pbcopy and pbpaste which along with pipes allow one to do a myriad of tasks.
At least it has a column view.
Same, honestly. I find it very pleasant to use. Especially compared to a lot of Linux file browsers
Yes, I was thinking the same.. For several years, I'm pretty happy with PathFinder by Cocoatech: https://cocoatech.io/
The things I miss the most when I accidentically open a Finder window: Cut files wit CMD+X to move them (never understood this when coming from Windows), cycle the files in a folder (start on top if you reach bottom and vice versa) and the comprehensive info bar on the right for files and folders. Give it a try :)
There's an app from Sindre Sorhus that adds CMD+X functionality to Finder.
https://sindresorhus.com/command-x
I used it for years and got so fed up with its pain points, including frequent crashes, a licensing system that never worked and nagged me despite legitimate purchase, and updates which reset and lost my preferences and sidebar organization. I’m now galaxy brained back to Finder again.
Instead of CMD + X you can do CMD + C and paste with CMD + Option + V
I recommend Alfred to replace Finder, Divvy for window management, iTerm2 for terminal, and homebrew to manage CLI utils.
This combination has served me well for many years.
The frustration with Finder led me to building my own tool. Not trying to replace Finder but more like a companion app - https://www.fileminutes.com/
I've been using Pathfinder for years (https://cocoatech.io/)
I gained a reputation at my workplace for complaining about this.
Nonsense default behavior, slow as heck, search barely works, keybindings are totally illogical.
It's totally unacceptable.
I honestly think that Explorer on Windows 11 is way worse than Finder. But I'd love a FilePilot [1] for macOS...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43091466
On Windows you have Total Commander at least :)
I've tried some clones for mac os, but they all missed some important (at least to me) functions. Like typing not going to the command line editor, or not having a command line at all.
So it's midnight commander from macports for most complex file operations for me.
Anyone who thinks finder is the worst file browser hasn't used Windows for 25+ years. Explorer can't even search files on the hard drive of the computer it's running on.
Explorer has its thumbnail processor on the same thread as the UI so if you have a lot of pictures in a directory it'll just hang indefinitely. Sometimes if you have too many files it won't display any at all.
If explorer crashes, it's the same process as your desktop and taskbar, so that disappears too.
For the shit people give Finder, it's astonishing how bad Explorer is.
I miss Finder's tree view in Explorer so much.
You may be interested in https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
You made my day! This is one of the things that've been bugging me since I moved to Macos.. THANK YOU
Thank you for sharing this!
This is the first thing I recommend to new Mac users.
> when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app
Do you mean Cmd + Tab? Because this doesn't happen for me at all. When I click on a window, just that window is focused, but if I Alt + Tab to an app all those windows come to the front, which I find annoying too.
Hijacking for a quick tip I'm not sure everyone is familiar with. On macOS, most know that Cmd + Tab will cycle through the open apps. Less well-known, Cmd + ` will cycle through windows within an app.
> when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app
I don't have that, and I can't remember having done anything to stop it.
'Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app' - I bloody hate this behaviour.
I switched to Windows/WSL because of this!!
Are you looking for this? https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/ Found it further down the comments.
I'll never get over the fact that I had to pay $8 just to have two windows split side-by-side without using the obtuse and intrusive fullscreen mode.
Made an account just to reply.
I use https://rectangleapp.com/ on Mac and it's great. I mostly use shortcuts Left Half and Right Half, and also Maximize (Not the fullscreen mode thank God)
Might as well recommend enabling moving windows around with by clicking anywhere on the window with a keybind just like in most Linux desktop environments https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/321918/move-window...
I appreciate that! When I switched to MacOS, I demoed both Rectangle and Magnet and found that, despite being paid software, Magnet offered a much more intuitive experience.
I'm happy to pay for software anyway, but after spending $4000 on a computer I expected such basic desktop manager features, which have been common since the 90s, to come with the package. This is not something extensions are supposed to do. This kind of crap is why I ditched GNOME.
I (personally) forked rectangle a few years back to give me thirds of a window, for a 32" display running in 4k@1x.
I use (basically) left, middle, right, and top half/bottom half.
Rectangle supports thirds, "two-thirds", fourths, "three-fourths", and sixths (top/bottom * thirds).
$14 for Divvy (from Mizage) is beyond worth it, IME.
> Like when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app
It doesn't happen here with any of the app currently in use: Chrome, Finder, Terminal, Outlook, or Teams.
Maybe this app will do https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/
> when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app
https://imgur.com/a/mr1E2sW
tannhaeuser presumably talks about clicking the corresponding button in the dock. Although, granted, that's the "app" button.
It's been many years since I used a mac, but I feel like the alt+tab (mac+tab?) menu had this behavior also.
Yea I also hate that. If i have two terminals on two screens then click on one, all the terminals are now in the foreground and blocking the IDE/whatever…
> [Expose] has completely lost any spatial determinism
Could you elaborate on that?
Not the OP, but I never know where a specific application will show up. Sometimes Chrome is on the left and my IDE is on the top right, sometimes it's the opposite. If it relates to the window location, I can't tell. Always mostly the same set of five or six applications, too.
I solve this (really nonsense) issue with Hammerspoon and this simple script:
Love that this is straight to the point.
My tips:
- Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > <cmd>), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workflows' to make frequent tasks extremely streamlined (I use one to open LLM prompts in five LLMs, so I press command + space 'llm <prompt>' and 5 browser tabs open with the same prompt in grok, claude, chatgpt, perplexity, and (local) deepseek.
- Itsycal: an 'install and forget' calendar for your menu bar (it also uses vim keybindings to move around the calendar which is a fun yet practical easter egg)
- There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
- Vivid for double the screen brightness
I used to use Alfred, but I've since switched to using Raycast as I liked some of the UI integration a bit better. I recommend trying it out!
https://www.raycast.com/
The product is good, but there’s a lot of telemetry that I was not comfortable with given that search bar like those may see very sensitive information.
I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.
Looks interesting.. how does it compare to Launchbar?
https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
Raycast has only rudimentary file workflows. Constant efforts for monetization (VC money) and milking AI hype are just cherries on top.
There’s so much AI cruft on that page that I can’t even tell what the product is supposed to be.
Only one AI section out of 12 total sections, and while the second section has an AI example, it's only one out of five.
It's basically Alfred with more (?) functionality. Which is basically Spotlight with more functionality. Which is basically a tool to "do stuff" from anywhere on the device.
> - There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?
+1 for magnet. Indispensable to the extent that on rare occasions I use others Macs where it’s not installed I’ll gift it to them (and they invariably become passionate about it).
I only tried the intersection of 'free' and 'trusted' (the latter being subjective, based on a glance at website/repo). I hadn't yet tried Magnet, but I see it's $5 so I'll splash out over the weekend and give it a try. Thanks for the rec! Any newb tips appreciated.
> There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.
Used Divvy for years, but switched to Moom last year and I’m very happy with it. One feature I particularly like is being able to set up “chains” of window positions to a single shortcut, so you can trigger it multiple times and it will cycle through different positions. I do miss the little grid layout window a bit, but Moom works a lot better for me overall.
Aerospace tiling window manager is amazing
I agree, aerospace is great! I'm surprised I don't hear of it more often. I'm recent convert to MacOS and was surprised at how bad the window management was by default, but aerospace fixed that right up.
Divvy+Stay is the magic combo for me: https://cordlessdog.com/stay/ (moves windows back to my external monitor when I plug it in)
Divvy is great, still working, yet development seems abandoned.
I used to use tiling window managers on Linux, but I found out that my Mac usage contains lots of “graphical” apps that don't like to live in a quarter of the screen or something like that.
So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.
I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).
I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.
I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.
> I've embraced overlapping windows.
Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.
Why not just have all your windows fullscreen and three finger swipe between them like macOS was designed to be used. If you dont like the extremely opinionated macOS window design why not just use Linux?
I've been using the Amethyst window manager for ~10 years. It's open-source and generally works well, though it occasionally requires a restart (the app, not the OS)
You should check out aerospace, much better than amethyst or yabai IMO
Have you tried out aerospace as window manager (https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace) ?
I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this
AeroSpace is really nice, when it works. As soon as I use more of CPU, for example to compile something, it gets unusably slow, as in 5 seconds to do anything slow. The worst part is that the workspaces are virtual, so when you kill it, you're left with a tens of pixel-sized windows in Mission Control.
So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.
Aerospace works pretty well, but has an issue that was a deal breaker to me, in apps that uses native tabs are not displayed as expected [0]
[0] https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/68
Spotlight has ALWAYS been terrible...
I lived with Alfred for many-many years, but Raycast seems much better this days. Simpler yet richer and constantly developed, many plugins, it's simple to do your own and... it has window manager
Is Raycast open source at all? With nearly $50M of funding (most recently $30M series B last fall) I have to wonder about the long term sustainability and whether I want to invest my time and workflows into the whims of a VC backed “free forever” plan.
Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.
It’s positively comedic that Bluesky, an entire large social network has taken less funding ($36M according to [1]) compared to Raycast (… an application launcher).
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bluesky-514d#financi...
This is a concern of mine as well. Alfred is also just so ridiculously lightweight and efficient compared to, well, everything these days. At 18MB on disk and sitting at 0% CPU and 42MB RAM on my machine right now with no spread of support processes, it feels almost like an endangered species Tiger-era Mac app that’s managed to survive to the current day.
As much as I'd like to imagine investors are shoveling money into a pit because they want us to have nice software, the sheer amount of money feels like the only two options are (A) to reach profitability we're raising prices way up to juice the people who have become dependent on Raycast when it was affordable, or (B) blah blah incredible journey, our team is being acquihired for a sort of related project and Raycast will slowly wither and die as we realign priorities with the people who pay us.
I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.
I should upgrade mine. I was on Alfred 3 before using Raycast.
Development has been slow lately, but Quicksilver[0] is still around as a FOSS alternative. We have an upcoming release that should refresh things a bit for Seqouia.
[0]: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver
Launchbar[0] is also still around - not actively developed, but actively maintained. Happy user since 10 years already, even though I own a lifetime Alfred license.
[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
Other good windows management options are Hammerspoon and BetterTouchTool:
https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/MiroWindowsManager.html
https://folivora.ai/
One thing that’s been annoying me about desktop/window management is that whenever I’ve organized my windows that I need for one project on one desktop, I eventually need to upgrade vscode or warp or macOS needs to be updated. And then restarting an app it forgets on which desktop each window was running… I typically have 3-5 projects open that I switch between (and trying to organize them on different desktops has been sort of futile.)
Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?
Right click on the app icon in the dock → Options → Assign to: This Desktop.
Default osx spotlight search is just as good as Alfred? What’s different?
Agreed. Spotlight search does quite well for me. I think there is a discoverability problem with native mac functionality. People tend to install lots of software that duplicates native features
> install lots of software that duplicates native features
I installed some software for key remapping and window tiling (karabiner and rectangle) when I couldn't figure out how to do it natively. You seem like you know what you're talking about; do you happen to have native recommendations?
Welp. I don't know what I'm talking about. But at least for key remapping, I use `hidutil`. For example, to remap right ctrl to fn:
To make it stick through reboots, you can run it in a launch agent. Posted my notes and plist file here: https://gist.github.com/andelink/9df452c8cafb6790f196277705c...For window tiling, can't say I've ever looked into it.
I was using Karabiner for years just to remap caps to a hyper key. A few months ago replaced it with a launchagent to run something like this remapping caps to F19 (and using F19 instead of hyper, in hammerspoon) -- has been working great.
I have no problems with Spotlight search. I use Alfred for the plug-ins, it's extensibility, workflows, clipboard history, everything else it can do.
Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?
I'm on Sonoma (14.5). In System Settings > Siri & Spotlight,
1. I can deselect some pre-defined categories that Spotlight searches
2. I can click the "Spotlight Privacy..." button (at the very bottom right). Then I can add folders for it to ignore.
(My preference is for Spotlight to ignore almost everything, so that it isn't indexing stuff and eating CPU on this old Macbook Air. I only have it scan Applications, Calculator, and System Settings. I have it specifically ignore my entire home directory which is where all my git repos are.)
https://www.alfredapp.com/help/kb/node-modules/
Spotlight search seems to have gotten better, while Alfred search has had me rebuild my index more than just a few times and it doesn't cope well with nested directories.
Something happened in 15.1 onwards for me where Spotlight has become way faster and way better. But yes, Alfred used to dominate in search and speed as well.
I tried reindexing a few times (each took a few hours) but spotlight search still rarely brought up the file/thing I was after. Examples:
Spotlight search would bring up a wikipedia entry for app store instead of the app store on my laptop: https://imgur.com/QV1w7Kq
Typing 'finder' and hitting enter (e.g. to browse for a file), would open finder settings, rather than finder itself.
I haven't used it in ~1 year, those are a couple of examples I can recall.
Alfred does a lot more beyond just searching.
Very true, for me, spotlight search felt so broken that Alfred would be worth it even if search was all it did.
Such as?
I should do a lot more with Alfred, but apart from using it as a launcher my most used feature is the clipboard search. After invoking it by typing 'clip' into the box, I get an incremental search on all clipboard contents it has tracked, and can re-copy any of those items to the current clipboard by pressing enter. Very useful and efficient when it's part of your workflow.
https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/
I have found simple hammerspoon scripts to be a great alternative to a windows manager. You can map keys to some parts of the screen. It also supports multi-display systems.
I find rectangle to be pretty good after needing a replacement for sizeup when development stopped there. My solution is to just ignore the existence of the full screen windows in favor of using the max window size shortcut to fill the current display. Then I can send a window to another display or resize it with shortcuts that are easy enough to get used to and avoid all the transitions that take seconds. The whole full screen experience is so bad otherwise, and this is from someone that is very used to the trackpad and all their gestures.
I just made my own window manager with Hammerspoon. First I copied whatever rectangle/magnet was doing and then added my own logic on top of it to fit the style I work with windows.
As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.
And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.
Is your config publicly avail anywhere?
Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.
I did the same, though I'd modeled my setup after my prior swaywm workflow. Hammerspoon was really the only thing that made macos usable for me.
Fwiw I hear good things about aerospace but haven’t yet had a chance to give it a shot.
I've recently switched from Amethyst to Aerospace and am really liking it
aerospace is good!
Came here to recommend aerospace. It’s been amazing. My whole desktop is like a tmux session now.
It’s very much changed how I work/use my computer. More than Rectangle did, more than LLMs have.
(I still adore hookshot/rectangle though :)
What does aerospace provide that yabai can't? I'm using yabai pretty much like I used to in Arch with i3
I’ve never used yabai or i3. I think the docs/defaults/configurations just really sold me on aerospace. yabai never really caught my eye. I’ve never seriously used Linux
I also think Aerospace was positioned as “macOS native features only” which helped sell me on it. Aka no hacks or workarounds
Aerospace is much better than yabai especially workspaces feature without disabling SIP
I'm using yabai with SIP enabled. The only thing that is missing is sending a window to another workspace. To do that I launch Mission Control and simply drag the window to desired workspace. It turns out I don't do that often so I can live with that.
I used Yabai for years until I found aerospace, and switched over instantly. Would highly recommend anyone to try it :)
I wanted to like it, but like all tiling window managers for macOS, it feels too tacked on and janky. For instance, Finder tabs simply aren't possible when using Aerospace.
I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.
I've been using SizeUp for window management on macOS for...15 years now I think? https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
Magnet is pretty good for window management, IMO.
My favorites:
To quickly find text, select some text and press ⌘E followed by ⌘G.
In save dialogs, press ⌘= to switch between the compact and expanded layout.
In save dialogs, press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
Hold Option while opening the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth menus to access extra options.
After copying a file, press ⌥⌘V to move the file instead of pasting a copy of it.
Terminal:
Press ⇧⌘A to select the output from the previous command.
Press ⌘L to clear the output from the previous command.
Press ⌃⌘V to paste and format text that is properly escaped for the shell.
Press ⌃T while a command is executing to view runtime statistics about the execution so far.
How do you exit the find text, selection mode (⌘E, ⌘G)? I have tried pressing the escape key, with no luck.
Click elsewhere?
> To quickly find text, select some text and press ⌘E followed by ⌘G.
This is really nice. Once I am in this 'search' mode, I couldn't figure out how to get out of this mode.
- Edited to make question more descriptive.
> After copying a file, press ⌥⌘V to move the file instead of pasting a copy of it.
This one is very cool
Coming from other OSes it's very dumb though, since ⌘X does not work for files (but it does for text! It's really confusing)
My thought exactly!
Does anyone have any advice for making the most of the Dock? I find it pretty unhelpful coming from an older Windows / Linux background: I just want easy access to the windows that are open on my current workspace on my current monitor, and it seems ill-suited to that. I usually have it on auto-hide because it takes up space without providing much value.
I'm aware that I can do the three finger swipe to look at all of my windows, but that takes over my full screen and the previews constantly move location, so I can't build any muscle memory for it.
Really, I'm just looking for a classic, unobtrusive task switcher that lets me quickly navigate through what's on my screen without having to muddle through anything else (i.e. the Windows taskbar with all collapsing turned off)
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions about using Cmd+Tab or Raycast or Exposé or such, but I'm really just looking for a taskbar equivalent that doesn't require me to use a hotkey or switch "visual contexts". I want something that's persistent and shows the visible applications and their windows, and lets me click on them to raise them. A big part of this for me is being able to see what I have open at a glance, especially due to macOS's historically poor window management.
Edit edit: This is on me for using the words "task switcher" - that brings to mind Alt-Tab when I really meant to refer to the taskbar.
I hide the dock and basically never use it.
Install Alfred or Raycast and Command+Space your way to everything. Its 100x faster. I can launch any app in about 3 key strokes, which takes < 2 seconds and often less than a second with muscle memory.
For example cmd+space+c will launch or switch to chrome. cmd+space+py is pycharm, cmd+space+go is goland, cmd+space+fi is finder, cmd+space+me is messages, cmd+space+1 is 1Password. cmd+space+1p+space will start searching 1Password.
That launches apps. You can also just start doing math problems (calculator) by just cmd+space and start typing out a math equation. cmd+space+ai+space and just start asking a question to AI.
These only scratch the surface. But cmd+space, which is an easy modifier combo that you can do anytime, will basically unlock unlimited power. Once you get the muscle memory down you can literally launch any app in less than a second without even looking. If the app is already open, it just brings that app to foreground. Once you have that, you can use alt+tab to switch between apps that are already open. This is useful if you are just swapping between two or three apps for reference quickly. Furthermore alt+tilde (the squiggle key above tab and below escape on most latin keyboards) will switch between open windows of the same type. FOr example if you have 2 chrome windows open, it will switch only between those windows.
Just for the record, you can cmd+space, type the name (or just a prefix in most cases) of an app and enter and launch it with just Spotlight.
Fast enough for me.
I also take this same approach on my phone. I'm on Android atm so I can use Nova Launcher for a completely blank home screen and then set a swipe gesture to bring up the search panel. On iPhone you can achieve similar by enabling removing everything from the home screen and using the app libary or search although it does look weird with the empty dock section at the bottom so I tended to just leave stuff like the browser in there.
I feel like I achieve the same app opening speed with built-in Spotlight e.g. `cmd+space me` opens Messages for me too, without any third party software
> cmd+space+1 is 1Password
FYI shift+cmd+space is also 1Password's quick access shortcut
- +1 for Stage Manager - check out Witch (https://manytricks.com/witch/) - you could also use Keyboard Maestro and build your own interface
https://contexts.co/ is the best alt+tab switcher I've ever used and it also provides a taskbar like you want.
For me, the dock is a drop target for files. Got a PNG and want to open it in Photoshop? Drag it to photoshop on the dock, for example.
I wrote https://robata.app for getting an overview of my open windows a while back. Let me know of any changes you would suggest. Thanks.
That looks really nice, but it's not quite what I'm looking for - thanks anyway, though!
You can try dockdoor to get Windows-style hover previews.
https://github.com/ejbills/DockDoor/
You can try https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
See if that suits your needs
You should use Exposé for that.
To swap between applications, use Cmd-Tab.
To swap between open windows of the current application you can use Cmd-Backtick.
So, the easiest way to swap between windows:
Cmd-Tab, up arrow, arrow keys to the window you want, enter
which is a lot of steps compared to just clicking the relevant window in a taskbar :(
John Siracusa has an app which is extra and opinionated Dock, although not directly for windows:
https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/
There's a detailed FAQ.
The dock just annoys me. I’ve been a Mac user for almost 15 years and it has never seemed useful for me. I cmd+tab or use Alfred to switch apps. To switch between windows of one application it’s cmd+`.
Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
> Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
You also do things like (for example) start a drag, ⌘+tab to show running apps, then drop on an app icon without using the dock.
The command-tab switcher has a lot of hidden functionality:
I always only use cmd-tab to open the switcher, then I use arrow keys to pick an application, up/down arrows to view an application’s windows (arrow keys and enter to select a specific one)
You can also hit Q to quit an application from the switcher and probably more things I’m currently forgetting.
Wait... What? That application-window trick is awesome. How have I been using been using Macs for twenty+ years and never found that? Discoverability = not-awesome.
As repetitive as these top-tips threads can be, we need one every now and again. Someone's guaranteed to learn something from them, and I'm grateful it was my turn today.
There are also very good third-party replacements for cmd+tab. the one I use is called Contexts. Improves the experience massively
The main thing for me was the windows previews, I used to have hyperdock but stopped showing the windows previews. Right now I am trying DockDoor, so far is ok but you need to speed up the fade animation or it has some annoying behavior (reopens preview if pointer gets hover).
Contexts has both hotkeys and a visual side bar that may do what you are asking.
It’s interesting hearing you say this. I come from Windows and thought it was just me.
I started using an app called Sidebar:
https://sidebarapp.net/
I find it superior to the dock. The applications on the task bar are persistent and only those active on the current desktop are shown. It handles multiple monitors too.
It has a few quirks I haven’t sorted out yet, but the overall experience is much closer to Windows 11.
Pro Tip: I use it conjunction with the dock by putting the dock on the side and shrinking the dock down to its smallest size and increasing the magnification effect.
This looks much closer to what I was looking for, thank you! Will try when I can :)
I like uBar a lot with Raycast or Alfred, but Spotlight works well enough too.
I autohide the dock when I get a new mac, and usually manage to forget it exists.
Command-Tab to switch apps, Command-Space to open apps.
Why would I want the Dock?
I have all popup and sound notifications off and from time to time i check the unread message count badges on the dock icons :)
I suddenly realize the only thing I use the dock for is to right-click the trash to empty it.
How do you empty the trash? It's never even occurred to me... how do you get to the trash except via the dock?
IIRC Finder has an option to delete files from the Trash 30 days after they're put there. I just enable that option and forget about the Trash completely.
I empty the trash with command-shift-backspace. I use the dock icon to open it, but I think there’s an entry in the Go menu
It's in the File menu of the Finder, towards the bottom.
Have you tried Stage Manager mode? It kinda does what you want, but with the windows on the side rather than the bottom.
Way, way too obtrusive, and not dense enough. I like it in concept, but it's just not practical, especially on a laptop screen.
I mean, it does work pretty similar to the windows task bar? If an application is open, it is listed there in the dock with a mark under it. You can pin applications to the dock or remove them via right clicking it. Right clicking on one will provide a list the windows which are open to which you can select from, as well as a "show all windows" option which will hide everything else, and visually show just the windows for that application (you can also just force-click on the app icon to do this).
The only difference I see is that the windows taskbar provides a preview thumbnail when hovering over the icons. In which case, there's apps you can get for that.
The big difference for me is that there is no way to quickly jump between multiple windows of the same application. I often have multiple different projects open in vscode and would love a way to switch between them without having to right-click and selecting one from the list. All I want is something like the windows taskbar with auto-grouping disabled.
The App Exposé gesture works really well for that purpose. It's gesture-based, but you can configure a hot corner to trigger it too.
You may like uBar: https://ubarapp.com/
This also looks like a great option! I have a vague memory of trying this before and finding it lacking, but I might need to re-evaluate.
One Windows shortcut that I use habitually is Ctrl + left or right arrow keys and optionally with shift in order to navigate by or select entire words at a time instead of single characters.
I’ve looked into MacOS approaches to achieve the same functionality in the past, but I never seemed to find anything of use. I’m wondering if anybody here would be aware of a solution.
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Kinda like command palette for every app, I like it. Would be even better if it preselected the matching option.
Unfortunately, this is broken in Firefox – they’ve bound ⌘ ? to their help page, and it opens then immediately closes the Help menu. You can rebind it to something else (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ /) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → Firefox, menu title: Get Help.
One other problem is, it doesn’t always find the command I’m looking for. E.g. when I typed “dev”, it didn’t show “Web Developer Tools” at first. I then checked Tools menu (it was there), then tried typing it in the Help menu again, and sure enough, it found it this time.
I've never gotten this to work on an ISO-keyboard (chunky enter key). It opens "Help" in every single app, even Apple's like Finder or Safari. I've tried GB, German, US-International, and my default EurKey layout. None of them work. This shortcut always felt like an Alt+F4 prank to me.
The help menu is what searches all menu items.
Shortcat basically does this. It indexes a lot of native AX APIs and also menu items
https://shortcat.app
The menu immediately closing was recently fixed[1] in Firefox 136. We'll look into the content of that menu not working correctly. Thanks.
1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1935257
Personal-Bookmarks::
Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Hold Option while resizing a window to resize from the center of the window. Hold Shift while resizing a window to lock the aspect ratio.
When a window is inactive, use the Command key to interact with it without making it active.
If an app has windows in multiple spaces, click the app's Dock icon repeatedly to cycle through the spaces with that app's windows.
Quickly move the Dock to a different side of the screen by holding Shift while dragging the resize handle.
Press ⌘B to search the web for the current query. Press ⌘⏎ or ⌘R to reveal the selected file in Finder. Use the name: filter to only search in the filename. Add kind:folder to only search for folder names. Hold Command to show the path to the currently selected file.
QuickTime Player: Grab a single frame from a video by pausing on the desired frame (using the Left and Right arrow keys to navigate individual frames) and pressing ⌘C.
Photo Booth: Hold Option while taking a picture to skip the countdown. Hold Shift while taking a picture to disable the screen flash.
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items
This is the one feature I miss most from using macos. I got used to it back when Ubuntu used unity as its DE and called it "HUD". Didn't work everywhere (looking at you, java), but a huge timesaver.
Ubuntu had to basically patch every toolkit for it to work. Not maintainable.
There are so many hidden/obscure keyboard shortcuts in macOS, from time to time a post with a nice collection (and usually some hidden gems) appears on the front page here.
But I always wondered if there is a place where you can find all of them, for reference.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650
Also pity that macOS makes very little effort to communicate these, so they almost feel like Easter eggs…
Huge miss in the "Native UI Conventions" which has a lot of keyboard shortcuts is that emacs/readline shortcuts are supported basically everywhere there's a text field: ^A ^E ^K ^Y opt-left/right behave as expected. Sadly no ^W tho.
I always miss that separation between command key and control key in other OSes.
For a mouse-first OS, there sure is a heavy dep on keyboard modifiers. Day to day it doesn't bother me so much, and I even like some of them, but so much functionality is hidden with no mouse-based option. Opt-Shift-V? :/
Windows does this much, much better. I can't think of a feature where you need to use the Windows key to modify the options presented in the GUI (though the Windows key has some unique shortcuts). I'm sure someone else will correct me.
Apple has a concise list of keyboard shortcuts/modifiers listed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650
Many of these features Windows has no analogue for. Consider:
> By default, clicking inside a scroll bar will scroll partially towards the clicked location. Hold Option while clicking in the scroll bar to jump directly to the clicked location.
There is no way to present this option in the GUI without cluttering up the scroll bar, so neither Windows nor macOS do so. But at least this feature is available for power users.
I admit that in places where there IS space in the UI (menu bar, right click), I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
> I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
Most likely to keep menus reasonably short and usable, which is particularly important on the smaller Macbooks and on iPads in Sidecar mode which can easily turn long menus into scrolling messes.
Also, progressive disclosure. This way allows the options to exist without overwhelming less technical users.
What I miss is when they had these T&Ts native to the OS. Like way back in the 90's...
"Hold Control and Option while clicking on a window to switch focus to that window without raising it."
TIL. Amazing little hack.
What is this useful for?
Writing in a text field in one window while referring to another window, where the window with the text field would overlap the other window if it were frontmost.
> Hold Option while pressing the Page Up/Page Down keys to also move the cursor while scrolling.
Not working for me on Sonoma, which is too bad because this always gets me when I think I've scrolled up.
Here’s my tip: Messages stuck with a badge but you have no idea what’s unread / how to clear it? Ask Siri for your unread messages. It’ll go through them and remove the badge.
I'm not affiliated, but when this kind of thing comes up, I always want to share GoToFile[0].
As far as I've seen, this is the only app for Mac that doesn't just reuse Spotlight search (which I find to be terrible).
I looked for exactly this type of app for years before finding it, and when I did, it didn't seem real with the old-fashioned website and zero mentions on sites like HN. But I can assure that it works great and it's maintained. I just wish the author would promote it better so it gets more attention and isn't so hard to find.
[0] https://www.soma-zone.com/GoToFile/
This might interest you too:
https://gist.github.com/devnoname120/4767a0aa18879217170fd0c...
Disclaimer: I wrote this. It's a random gist that I wrote for me but it somehow got 150+ stars. Tbh I'm not even sure how people even heard about it because I didn't post it anywhere… Either way I guess people seem to like it, so hopefully you will find it useful too!
YMMV, but I’ve found that at least for my display, this:
> When Macbook Air M1 is sleeping, external screens connected via USB-C keep waking up every few minutes and then go straight to sleep again.
is fixed in Sonoma (yay!)
- I love Shortcat (https://shortcat.app/). It lets you do almost anything on your screen without having to leave your keyboard.
- Also, Houdahspot (https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/) for advanced searching and file-filtering (you can even exclude results from certain folders). It has search templates, saved searches (which appear as files in Finder), and the ability to export the current search as a Smart Folder (amazing!).
I just wish that Smart Folders worked on iOS and Dropbox …
And I'll add:
cmd+opt+shift+esc force quits the current app (cmd+opt+esc opens the force quit window, as the former doesn't work sometimes).
Cmd+q quits the current app, and, when command is held and we're cycling through apps with cmd+tab, it quits the currently selected app. If you need to quit multiple apps at once, hold cmd, press tab to select the apps to quit, and just quit them with q.
> On modal dialogs/sheets, press Command + the first letter of the button to press that button. ⌘. is the shortcut equivalent of the Escape key.
This was my favorite, but no longer works on Sequoia or whenever was the version that changed modal dialogs.
Remember when Mac was intuitive?
I dig these cheat sheets but wow, what a total shift in paradigm from when you had one mouse button and if a feature wasn’t discoverable then it wasn’t shipped
Apple has been using these non-discoverable keyboard modifiers since the very start. I remember using them with System 6 back around 1990.
Their design philosophy has always been discoverability for regular features, and then these extra "hidden" features for power users.
Nothing has changed.
Just because you didn’t know about a feature doesn’t mean it didn’t ship. Why do you think those modifier keys were on the keyboard to begin with? Because many of these features have been there for decades.
For a long time, Macs shipped with a tutorial that trained people to double-click. Unlike a second button, it's not discoverable.
We sure (most) of these features haven't been available for ages?
Most of these features have been available, for years, if not decades.
I think the issue goes beyond this. I get that Apple was always opinionated and wanted to ship intuitive features. Now they lost track of the intuitive and continued with the opinionated part, which degrades the experience in my opinion.
It feels like Ms. Casey is narrating these in my head.
Your outie uses Alfred.
It's interesting but also annoying because localized versions of macOS don't have the same shortcuts, or at least I cannot make them work. The main problem is that some special characters such as / are in a different key and they also require modifier keys to type them.
One of my favourite tips is to hold down Command while dragging important apps, files and folders to the Finder toolbar in order to ‘pin’ them. You can then drag files to ‘Open in…’ (eg, images to ImageOptim) or just launch apps.
My one and only tip: use AI file renaming: https://keepitshot.com. This is the app I have recently fallen in love with. It has drastically improved my file search experience with Spotlight.
I am not affiliated with them.
Don't forget you can drag the proxy-icon from any open document or folder. Handy for the open/save-dialog
I remember a launcher that was kind of bare bones and didnt use spotlight for indexing, it compiled its own index, and was able to do great fuzzy searching, but I forgot the name and cant find it, anyone else have a clue?
Certainly LaunchBar as mentioned above.
LaunchBar?
Possibly QuickSilver?
No, it's not that, it look more "command-line" style, very minimal UI... if that helps
> Open/Save Dialogs
> Drag a file or folder from Finder into an open/save dialog to jump directly to that file.
Doesn't work consistently anymore (Sequoia 15.2). Instead of focusing on the file, it moves the file you selected from Finder to the folder shown in the save dialog. It completely breaks the workflow.
Surprisingly, it works as expected one out of ten times. It seems to depend on where on the save dialog you drag the file from Finder. Extremely frustrating!
A shout-out for https://espanso.org a wonderful and free text expander configurable in a YAML file.
Love espanso! Particularly because it is FOSS and cross-platform, allowing me to use my snippets across macOS, Linux, and windows!
Regarding Terminal:
To unconditionally clear all buffered output, regardless how many commands have been invoked, use ⌘K.Nice list!
If you need a pixel ruler, ⇧⌘4 and hit Escape to discard the screenshot
There's also this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free-ruler/id1483172210?mt=12
Anyone know how to copy and paste without formatting into Outlook for Mac, without having to click the tiny dropdown box it creates when pasting formatted text? Outlook appears to have no setting for this and also ignores the key combination that works for most other apps…
dont know whether that works on apple or not - but i just paste into an unformatted textbox (e.g. browser address bar) and copy again from there
command-option-shift v maybe?
…and also ignores the key combination that works for most other apps…
> Hold the Option key while expanding an outline view to recursively expand all children.
I use this pretty frequently and it’s always a drag to find when an app doesn’t implement it. It feels so silly to be forced to manually open/close numerous items when most other apps I use can expand/collapse them all in one go.
GitHub uses this shortcut, too. (e.g. Option-click to collapse/expand all PR comments.)
> When a video is playing, right click the speaker icon in the address bar or tab to enter Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode.
You can also double right-click the video itself and enter Picture-in-Picture mode from that menu
Any recommendations for some kind of file manager to replace finder?
PathFinder is the only one I can think of. I find it overly complicated when all I really need is Finder - the endless jank.
Windows user here, feeling like an outsider—but bookmarking this for when I finally see the light.
How do I right click and add a blank text file to a folder?
I've used Apple's Automator app to add a new custom Quick Action which does exactly this. After right-clicking a folder, the right-click menu shows my custom Quick Action to create an empty text file.
This requires about 5 to 10 minutes to set up. You'll find instructions for this on the web or via some LLM. I've looked right now for a suitable article, but the ones I've found are subtly different from my Quick Action. I've asked ChatGPT and its instructions seem to be correct.
This one kills me too.
I don't miss anything about Windows.
Except this.
I've been using a Mac for 15 years now, and I still want to right-click and create an empty text document.
Switch back to windows - for me that is one of the things I struggle with on MacOS.
Creating a file at a path where I have my file explorer is so ingrained in me. It feels awful when I have to open an app then click through to save file where I want all those clicks are supper annoying because I already was in that place.
Awful thing getting current path from Finder to paste it in save dialog is also not really easy. So I am just not creating new files on MacOS.
On one hand I kind of get the idea that well you start with opening an app and then save your work and most likely it could be in default documents folder.
But years of other way I was used to work it feels annoying.
Basically I use Windows for like 30 years now and in that last 10 I use MacOs as primary OS for my personal device.
When i first moved from Windows to MacOS i was shocked there was no default shortcut to start Apps from the Dock, like Windows Key +1, 2, 3 etc. (It is configurable though)
Ubuntu Unity had that first, way before Windows had morphed the task bar to something dock like.
awesome tips. Thanks for posting.
For screenshots:- does anyone know of a way to take scrolling screenshots? I often need to take screenshots of webpages that are long.
Chrome dev tools > the three little dots at the top right of the window > capture full size screenshot.
I always look for it in the three little dots that are next to the 'x' in the dev tools drawer, but it's actually behind the dots in the top nav that show screen dimensions, throttling, device orientation, etc.
Firefox has this built in. That’s how I do it.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/take-screenshots-firefo...
Does anyone know of a good solution to manage menubar on Mac? Have M2 Pro with a notch which hides many of many items and it's so difficult to access them unless I quit a few of them.
Bartender or dozer depending on what you want
Icebar
I second Ice - it's great
https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
Its good but I kill it frequently..
Huh, I've never had to kill it!
When the Open/Save dialog is open, hit Cmd+Shift+G to open a dialog where one can input the path as a string. Really useful when switching between terminal and GUI.
That's covered, but it's even easier:
Press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
Discovered today:
Cmd-click a window that is not currently focused; it'll register the click without making that window take the foreground
Is it really a good UI if they need to write a talmud to explain it?
I am a cheapskate and use Quicksilver. Command spacebar, app pops up.
I hate the Finder. I used to use an app called cols that resized finder windows to an appropriate size. Stuck it in the finder toolbar. I looked for the applescript but can't find it. How tough is it to fill the finder window with all the columns so that the Magic Mouse doesn't wag the columns back and forth? Just fill the window. Cols, anyone?
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items.
Shift command slash, got it.
> Press ⌃F2 to move keyboard focus to the application's menu bar. Start typing the first few letters of a menu title to jump to that menu.
Control F2? Control shift F2? None of those work on macOS Sequoiua.
Try Fn+Control+F2
You also need Fn on laptops. I just tried it. And it seems to start with focusing the apple menu without opening it, and the focus marker is hard to notice, at least in natural light where I am now.
This will depend on whether you have the function key row set to act as function keys or as special keys (based on the icons printed on them).
Nice. Now I only need a mac.
It is weird to say, but I wish macOS had Windows 10 interface. It's incredible to me how backwards macOS is in comparison to W10, that is already deemed clunky. Finder is an abomination, window management seems like embodies ADHD, separate apps needed for basic things like direction of scrolling or switching windows...
you guys didn't already know this stuff?
"Hold Option while double-clicking a window's corner to expand the window to fill the screen." - this is the most important tip for macOS, IMO. I still don't understand what's in their heads that they don't maximise Safari/Preview to the full width by default.
I have 32" display and I'm using all my windows maximized, I just don't ever want them side by side or something like that.
That is because the green button is a «zoom» button, which maximizes the window to display its contained document: https://blog.xoria.org/macos-tips/#window-management
I am not sure if I agree with the choice either, but that’s the explanation.
That’s how you work, though. Having Safari fullscreen is really not great for me. Nor Preview. Actually the only thing I have fullscreen (not in its Space) is Xcode.
EDIT: I meant window maximized to fill the screen, not fullscreen, which is what option-double-clicking a window corner does.
Full screen is not the same as maximized to fill the screen.
As a tip for security sensitive users, I would also recommend this third party application to check your macOS security settings:
https://paretosecurity.com/mac