25 Essential Tips & Tricks For Macbook Owners

1. Speed up your Mac usage by using Spotlight. Press Command + Space and you can quickly find files, open apps, search the web, and make system-wide searches

2. Spotlight also acts as a calculator or currency converter.

3. If you ever lose your mouse, just shake it and the cursor will automatically enlarge.

4. If your Mac freezes up and forces you to quit some apps there’s no “Ctrl Alt Delete” instead, you hit Command + Option + Escape to shut tasks down the hard way. This is a bit faster than right-clicking on each app.

5. You can delete files on your Mac by sending them to the trash bin. The fastest way to do this is to select a file and hit Command + Delete.

6. Taking a screenshot on Mac is easy, at any point, hit Command + Shift + 3 to capture the whole screen, or Command + Shift + 4 to capture a custom portion of the display.

7. You can move your windows by holding Command as you drag them around. This may not be crucial, but a click saved can always be appreciated.

8. If you ever feel like changing which apps you load when you boot up your Mac, go to System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items, then add, check, and uncheck whatever you want to prioritize.

9. Whenever you need an accent mark (or related foreign character), hold down the appropriate letter and a list of relevant options will pop up.

10. When you have a moment where there’s a certain word you want to write, but can’t quite remember what it is. If you know you’re close, hit Fn + F5 as you’re typing something, and you’ll get a list of similar word.

11. When you see an unfamiliar word just highlight it and hit Command + Control + D, you can get dictionary definitions and Wikipedia info without having to leave your page.

12. If you frequently pair bluetooth headphones with your Mac, go to System Preferences > Sound and check off “show sound in menu bar.” You can then change the volume from the menu bar, and hold Option while clicking on the icon to quickly change the source.

13. Speaking of the menu bar: You can make it so that the menu bar only shows up when you scroll toward it. To do so, go to System Preferences > General, then click “Automatically hide and show the menu bar.”

14. If you like to keep the menu bar handy, rearrange the icons within it by holding Command and dragging them around. You can also use this to remove certain icons off the menu bar completely.

15. If you’re only working on a couple of things, Split View layout by holding down the rightmost (or green) button at the top of a given window.

16. This may not be for everyone, but the built-in “Hot Corners” setting lets you clear the windows off your desktop, open the Mission Control page, or set your display to sleep, among other tricks, just by moving your mouse to a certain corner of the page. Experiment and see if it speeds up your workflow by going to System Preferences > Mission Control, and selecting “Hot Corners…” at the bottom.

17. Have you heard about Preview? Preview is Apple’s built-in image editor & one of the most underappreciated aspects of macOS. If you need to resize, annotate, or change file type for your images, you may not have to buy Photoshop.

18. Along those same lines, make use of Apple’s QuickTime Player. You can record whatever audio or video is playing on your screen and don’t need to download any third-party software.

19. If you want to adjust your Mac’s volume, but only by a little bit, hold Shift + Option as you hit the Volume Up or Down buttons. This will change it in smaller increments. You can even get similarly granular control with your screen’s brightness too.

20. Want more control of how you resize windows? Instead of taking two swipes to stretch something horizontally and vertically, you can hold Option + Shift while you resize, which lets the whole thing grow and shrink proportionally at once.

21. Another minor, but useful thing: In Finder, you can rename files and photos in bulk, rather than changing each one manually by highlighting what you need, then right clicking, & select “Rename [X] items…”, and enter your new info into the naming tool that pops up.

22. Create custom keyboard shortcuts for certain apps by going to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, click the “+” icon to add an app, then add your shortcut function and corresponding keypress from there.

23. The latest macOS Sierra update put Apple’s Siri voice assistant on the desktop. It’s similar to Spotlight and still a little awkward to converse with in public, but it works for voice searching the web, finding photos, or looking through files and messages. You can see it in the dock or menu bar.

24. Another semi-useful addition built into Sierra is a picture-in-picture mode. It only works with Safari, and not every video site supports it, but it can help maximize your space. It’s not immediately visible on YouTube but there, you have to right click on a video twice to bring up the option.

25. Lastly there is Terminal. Though macOS is pretty fast on its own, a few changes to your system’s animations can make the whole thing feel just a little bit quicker.