Command + double click a search item in spotlight to open the containing folder in finder.
Press Cmd to reveal the path
Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
121–130 of 540 posts
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#122Cmd-Ctrl-Space (⌘⌃␣) for the character/emoji picker. Also, under Keyboard in preferences, check the "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar" option to get it as a menu-bar icon. This also includes the keyboard viewer, which is handy to figure certain Shift-Opt-Whaterver combos for seldom-used characters. EDIT: Updated with the actual default command.
How do you close it? Cmd-W doesn't work for this type of window.
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#123Show hidden files (dotfiles) inside any finder window or file open dialog: Cmd + Shift + . Discovered after ~10 years
Why would they not put this in the View menu? I can even imagine someone invoking it by mistake and not working out how to undo it.
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#124Has anyone found a way to name desktop spaces anything other than Desktop 1, Desktop 2 etc?
Not a built in feature: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/211954/how-can-i-n... Some people on this post are using ‘Stickies’ app to put a label on each one? Otherwise, there are 3rd party apps that do it.
Thanks for this. I did look into this a while back and both Total Spaces and the github project require at least temporary disabling SIP.
I may go for that commercial app anyway because it really is costly to lose context built up in a space. Especially when you have a lot of completely unrelated projects you want to task switch between.
I’d go so far as to say lack of Spaces feature polish in MacOS is impacting my ability to efficiently maintain open source code. Because those projects only get special extra time from me these days.
Apple should make more spaces API open to developers if Apple won’t improve this important macOS feature.
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#125Wait until you find out you can change which directory screenshots save to. I have a dedicated "screenshots" directory in my home directory. And then a stack in the Dock for it similar to the one for the Downloads folder.
Any idea if there is a way to remove the preview that shows up in the bottom right corner? OSX doesn't write the screenshot until after that disappears which is annoying
You can also do it using commandline
`defaults write com.apple.screencapture show-thumbnail -bool false`
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#126Three-finger drag is the one thing I just can't live without.[0]
Finder: Cmd+Shift+G to navigate wherever I want (with autocomplete)
Text input: Control+Command+Space for the emoji list and search
Text input (switching keyboards for Japanese input): Control+Space for quick toggles
Text input (accents in my native language): all the accents and letters of various European languages are usually made by using Option+[key] for the accent, and Option+[key]+letter for the proper letter. The [key] maps are e -> ´, `` -> `` (I'm messing up the rendering of the quotes here despite my best efforts), i -> ˆ, u -> ¨ and some keys Option+[key] directly give a character when it's unique, such as Option+a=å and Option+o=ø, and Option+1=¡ (because it's the key for ! otherwise, which makes sense - and can help with Spanish)
For the longer examples, Option+e+e = é, Option+e+a = á, Option+`+a = à, Option+u+u = ü, Option+i+u = û, Option+n+n = ñ, etc.
Holding Option in menus also shows extra options and their shortcuts (although this is less and less the case outside of the Apple apps themselves). An example using Finder -> Edit and pressing/releasing the Option key[1]
Oh and one more: the app "Stickies", which allows you to have "post-it notes" with color coding and collapsing the note by double-clicking on the title, saving to file, etc. I use it to take quick notes or set casual reminders.
Last but not least, not an Apple app but a very helpful tool I've used to make the gif in this post: Kap is incredibly convenient to records bits of the screen and save to various formats, and it's been improving a lot since its early releases[2] (I have no stake in this, I'm just thankful for such a cool piece of free software)
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204609
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#127pbcopy / pbpaste (command line tool to access the clipboard)
Not builtin on macOS but iTerm2 is a must (together with oh-my-ZSH it's been a game changer)
The "time machine" on apps has been useful as well, rolling back to a previous version of a doc is great.
Some "unexpected feature" I found the other day. I accidentally dropped my MBP (and it seems it is engineered to close itself on drops but I knew that already ahem so it fell shut and upside down) and it started making a siren-like noise, as I began to get worried, I opened the screen and it was showing only glitches and it restarted (well sh1t). But then it restarted just fine and crisis averted.
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#128You can assign a folder full of images to the background of Terminal.app, and it will choose background images at random, so a folder full of dark solid colors gives you random dark backgrounds, enabling you to tell your terminal windows apart easily.
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#129Focusing the menubar with Control-F2. You can then navigate by arrow keys or typing. Space bar activates the highlighted menu/submenu. It makes life so much better. Control-F2 itself was slightly broken in 10.14 (IIRC), so I hacked up a dumb workaround in my Hammerspoon config: https://github.com/NateEag/dotfiles/blob/99f6b641151f85f6f78...
Command-Shift-? is the better version of this imho, directly opens the help menu and you can just type the name of the menu item and hit enter. Way quicker than navigating to it.
Yep this is what I came to say - OSX's help menu automatically searches all menu commands and if you hover over them it will open up the menu, show you the location, and if you hit enter just use it for you.
This is also something you can generally call from Applescript as well, if you want to automate application behaviors.
Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
#130Wait until you find out you can change which directory screenshots save to. I have a dedicated "screenshots" directory in my home directory. And then a stack in the Dock for it similar to the one for the Downloads folder.
Any idea if there is a way to remove the preview that shows up in the bottom right corner? OSX doesn't write the screenshot until after that disappears which is annoying
Found out the other day that you can drag and drop this into a document...