title	macOS Tidbits
layout	base.liquid

Window interactions

When ⌘↹-ing between apps, mouse over an app and release ⌘ to switch to that app without having to spam ↹ or ⇧↹.

Relatedly, while ⌘command↹tab-ing, hit Q to Quit or H to Hide an app.

Also while ⌘↹-ing, press ↓, ↑ or 1 to Show All Windows for that app.

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

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

Text selection

When using the cursor to select text, double-click to select a word. Triple-click to select a paragraph.

Relatedly, double-click and drag to select word-by-word. Triple-click and drag to select paragraph-by-paragraph.

Screenshots

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

Relatedly, you can make screenshots save somewhere else.

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

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

Relatedly, you can make shadowless default for window screenshots. Hold ⌥ to add the shadow.

Menu bar

⌘-drag to reorder icons in the menu bar.

Click and hold the Spotlight button in the menu bar to reset its location on screen.

Any self-respecting Mac app opens the Help menu when you press ⌘?. (Safari, for some god-forsaken reason opens the Tips app instead. 🤬)

Function keys

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

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

• Same goes for Sound settings: ⌥-press mute or volume up/down.
• Again with Keyboard settings: ⌥keyboard brightness up/down.

(Works with Touch Bar too! ⌥-tap the corresponding button in the Control Strip.)

Finder

When using {% footnoteref 'finder-drag-drop', 'By default, macOS will move the file if you’re dragging within the same drive (well, technically, the same partition). If you drag to a location on a different drive, Finder will copy by default. This is when these modifiers come in handy.' %} drag & drop to copy/move a file, hold ⌘ to force Finder to move the file, or hold ⌥ to force Finder to copy the file.{% endfootnoteref %} (Yes, you can ⌥-drag to duplicate a file within a single folder.)

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

In any Save sheet, drag and drop a folder onto the sheet to navigate there in the Save sheet. Drag and drop a file to navigate there and prepopulate the Save As field with its filename.

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

Tabs

Middle-click a tab to close it.

Hold ⌥ when closing a tab to close all other tabs instead.

Custom shortcuts

For any menu item (that is, anything in the menu bar), you can set a custom keyboard shortcut in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts… → App Shortcuts. Take care to spell the name of the command exactly—{% footnoteref 'ellipsis', 'The ellipsis ( … ) appears often, for which you should use ⌥; rather than approximating with three full stops ( ... ).' %}including special characters.{% endfootnoteref %}

Column views

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

Right-click with keyboard

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

Custom icons

Change the icon of any Finder item: Copy any image or {% footnoteref 'icns', '.icns is the Apple Icon Image format, which is used for icons macOS-wide. It’s basically just a container of an icon at different sizes. Why not just scale one image? Designers can use optical sizing to optimise the “same” icon for display at different sizes.' %}.icns file{% endfootnoteref %}, Get Info on any item in Finder, click to select the icon in the top left, and paste! Or simply drag & drop an image or .icns onto the icon.

Relatedly, you can even copy the icon from one file’s Info panel to paste into another.

Also relatedly, a bunch of the system icons live in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/.

Spelling dictionary

When macOS says you’ve spelled something wrong, and you right-click then choose Learn Spelling, it just adds the word to the ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary file. If you’ve added a word to your dictionary that you no longer want, just open up the file and delete the word.

Relatedly, ⇧⌘G in any Finder window and {% footnoteref 'pathname', 'If you really want, you can type it. 🤷' %}paste a pathname{% endfootnoteref %} to go straight to that file or folder. (See the Go to folder… tip.)

Dock

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

Ditto in Spotlight, where ⌘⏎ also works—and is probably more useful.

Don’t want to accidentally add/remove apps from your Dock? Lock its contents by running:

defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true && killall Dock

Set it back to normal with:

defaults delete com.apple.dock contents-immutable && killall Dock

Terminal

{% footnoteref 'open-in', 'This is just a special case of dropping a file (or folder) onto an app icon to open it in that app (either in the Dock, or in Finder).' %}Drag and drop a folder onto the Terminal icon to open a terminal directly to that directory.{% endfootnoteref %}

Relatedly, {% footnoteref 'iterm', 'This also works in iTerm. Though Terminal is a perfectly adequate terminal emulator, if you’d like a few more bells and whistles, iTerm is worth looking at. As is Warp, but as of March 2025, Warp doesn’t support this ⌘-drag shortcut. Criminal.' %}⌘-drag a folder onto a Terminal window to cd there without typing anything.{% endfootnoteref%}

Network quality

Test your network capacity without any third party things (like speedtest.net or fast.com) by running networkQuality from the command line, optionally using the -v flag for verbose output very nerdy details.

> networkQuality

==== SUMMARY ====
Uplink capacity: 34.685 Mbps
Downlink capacity: 225.857 Mbps
Responsiveness: Low (485.706 milliseconds | 123 RPM)
Idle Latency: 38.958 milliseconds | 1540 RPM