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.
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.
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)
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…
- 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.
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.
> 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.
> - 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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 …
> 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!
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!
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…
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?
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)
> 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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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/
What exactly is so bad about Finder? I've never had any issues with it.
Same, honestly. I find it very pleasant to use. Especially compared to a lot of Linux file browsers
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.
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
This is the first thing I recommend to new Mac users.
'Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app' - I bloody hate this behaviour.
I switched to Windows/WSL because of this!!
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
I don't have that, and I can't remember having done anything to stop it.
> 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.
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 (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.
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?
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.
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.
Raycast has only rudimentary file workflows. Constant efforts for monetization (VC money) and milking AI hype are just cherries on top.
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.
> 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.
Aerospace tiling window manager is amazing
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.
> - 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.
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
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 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.
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.
I should upgrade mine. I was on Alfred 3 before using Raycast.
Other good windows management options are Hammerspoon and BetterTouchTool:
https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/MiroWindowsManager.html
https://folivora.ai/
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
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.
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.
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 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?
https://www.alfredapp.com/help/kb/node-modules/
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 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?
https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/
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.
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?
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
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.
Magnet is pretty good for window management, IMO.
I've been using SizeUp for window management on macOS for...15 years now I think? https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
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.
> 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
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.
You can try dockdoor to get Windows-style hover previews.
https://github.com/ejbills/DockDoor/
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.
You can try https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
See if that suits your needs
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
Contexts has both hotkeys and a visual side bar that may do what you are asking.
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).
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
I like uBar a lot with Raycast or Alfred, but Spotlight works well enough too.
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.
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?
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
Have you tried Stage Manager mode? It kinda does what you want, but with the windows on the side rather than the bottom.
You may like uBar: https://ubarapp.com/
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.
> 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.
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
Shortcat basically does this. It indexes a lot of native AX APIs and also menu items
https://shortcat.app
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…
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
We sure (most) of these features haven't been available for ages?
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.
- 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 …
> 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!
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!
It feels like Ms. Casey is narrating these in my head.
Your outie uses Alfred.
> 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.
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…
command-option-shift v maybe?
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
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?
LaunchBar?
Possibly QuickSilver?
No, it's not that, it look more "command-line" style, very minimal UI... if that helps
> 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
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
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.
> 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.)
Regarding Terminal:
To unconditionally clear all buffered output, regardless how many commands have been invoked, use ⌘K.Windows user here, feeling like an outsider—but bookmarking this for when I finally see the light.
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..
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.
How do I right click and add a blank text file to a folder?
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 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
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.
Nice. Now I only need a mac.
you guys didn't already know this stuff?
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
"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.