macOS Tips & Tricks

Use an alternative to Finder

Replacing BSD utils with GNU utils is quite useful if you’re coming from Linux

Might have to keep coming back to this thread, but here’s a few that come to mind:

Spaces

I fell in love with Spaces when I got my tiny 11" MBA - combined with being able to swipe from Space to Space made macOS really nice to use.

On a desktop they are even more powerful - making it easy to work on multiple projects at the same time.

I also don’t let it order by last use - so I always have Apple Music full screen in a space on the far left, followed by Mail, followed by my main desktop (with safari, Music in a mini player, Terminal windows of any servers I am keeping an eye on, an open note, etc).

Hot Corners

I use hot corners a lot, mine are set to:

• Top left - Mission Control
• Top Right. - Show desktop
• Bottom left - Application windows
• Bottom right - Notification centre

LittleSnitch

First thing I instal on every Mac. See our thread about it here: Do you use LittleSnitch or the equivalent on your OS?

Also, while on the topic - the first thing I do whenever I get a new Mac…

Stats

Install with brew install stats - it’s a nice way to keep an eye on performance issues, especially after macOS upgrades.

Turn off Spyware

In System settings:

• Analytics & Improvements - off
• Apple Intelligence Report - to off, it is on for every 15 minutes by default even if you have Apple Intelligence off!
• Spotlight > Help Improve Apple Search (it is on by default!!)
• Spotlight (turn off anything that sends your search query to Apple - eg web/wikipedia etc)
• iCoud - turn off for photos, and anything else you don’t want on their servers (I only use it for Books, Contacts, Calendar, Private Relay (experimenting with it), Notes).

Desktop Wallpaper - cycle every 5 minutes

I have a huge amount of desktops from https://wallscloud.net and I set my Mac to randomly change from my specified folder every 5 minutes. Works really well on an Ultrawide monitor combined with the ‘Show desktop’ hot corner when a nice landscape appears - kind of brings the outside in and lets your eyes focus on what we might be doing if out in nature.

Curiously, not only do I find landscapes calming, but wallpapers of outer space too (think there are some studies on it/looking at the stars).

Apple Music - play non-Apple radio stations

Don’t think many people know this but you can add any internet radio to play via Apple Music not just their own radio stations. Go to: File > Open URL Stream and paste the url into it (eg https://www.bassdrive.com/bassdrive3.m3u). You can then add it to a playlist like normal.

• Re-encode your videos to a format your GPU can decode natively because CPU/software decoding makes the fans turn on on Intel Macs.

• Use SoundSource. Super useful. Every program needing to input or output sound can be rerouted. I have my 3 music and one video players playing through my TV and its awesome soundbar, one browser (Edge) I only use for conferencing and it has microphone directed at great headphones but the sound is still through my Mac’s speakers, I have another browser only direct sound to my Airpods Max headphones, and I have another video player playing on Mac’s speakers. Telegram / Slack / Zoom sound always goes to my dedicated conferencing headphones. Etc. Again, very useful piece of software. Hope Linux can provide something similar when I migrate to it.

• Use BetterDisplay. Helps me force my aging TV to always be in 60Hz mode (my Mac had the nasty habit to always default it to 30Hz) but it’s also a very nice centralised place to manage your displays in depth. It was also the only UI program I was able to find that managed to control my TV’s brightness through software (I could use CLI tools for it but it’s not something I enjoy reaching the terminal for; a glaring exception in my case). Oh, actually there’s also EasyRes but it has much less features.

• Use Alfred and not Spotlight.

• I still use iStat Menus and not Stats but that might change. Just haven’t bothered. I have noticed that since Sequoia (macOS 15x.) the CPU reporting is not accurate but that might be due to the OS itself because even htop was not able to find what made my Mac work more and get hotter. One thing that iStat Menus helped me with was devise my own fan control logic, one that I eventually dropped because I concluded that the system built-in one was smarter than mine but still, I like having the option.

I went even further: I have aliased cp to call gcp and all others. For 6 full years using this Mac I think I have encountered an issue only once or twice and hot-fixed the script and all was well.

Yes I did the same, there’s a script/command that prints out how to do it after you brew install it.

Rectangle is very handy for moving and resizing windows with a keyboard.

If you use Homebrew, you can disable analytics.

export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1

or

brew analytics off

Other than that, try not to leave terminal I guess

ctrl-F3 (or rather the window thing) - to show windows in current app.

raycast instead of alfred has replaced most of the toolings for me.