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Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

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Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#221

Post by hjuutilainen »

jlturner wrote: post #187

This has been around for a long time but most people don’t know about it: Dragging and dropping files from the finder into an file selector window (ie. Open File in most programs) will navigate to that file and select it. As others mentioned this works in terminal as well to give you a path, but actually this generally works in any text box (unless it specifically handles paths being drag ‘n dropped). This also works…

And if, for example, a webpage has a button to select files through the open file dialog, you can just drag and drop a file to the button and not go through the open dialog at all.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#222

Post by frankjr »

oneplane wrote: post #184
frankjr wrote: post #132

You can tell Finder to show actual folder sizes instead of just "--". Right click in a folder -> Show View Options -> Calculate all sizes. I'm not sure why it's not the default, it's not like Finder needs to traverse the folders hierarchy to calculate the size (I hope!).

It does have to traverse the complete filesystem to calculate the sizes. That is how most filesystems work (files have sizes, folders do not - so a folder size doesn't exist and is just a sum of whatever it contains)

Interesting, I thought it uses the Spotlight index to get this information and that the index already contains these aggregates, but you're probably right considering that it works even in folders that I've explicitly excluded (I wonder how many millions of node_modules folders are indexed for no reason).

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#223

Post by sgt »

astoilkov wrote: post #186

⌘⌃⇧4 – for screenshots that go directly into your clipboard ⌘O – open file/folder in Finder ⌘J in Finder, Set as Defaults — sets default view options for all folders (struggled a lot with Finder inconsistencies before finding this out)

I use the first one so often. So super-convenient to compose emails or Keynote presentations with some additional graphics plopped in directly from another window through the clipboard.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#227

Post by MaxBarraclough »

tln wrote: post #142

Mouse keys -- as an anti-feature. (press option 5 times) My daughter enabled it while I wasn't at the computer and then thought my keyboard had died. Even took it in to get repaired, and got a new keyboard. There is no permanent indicator that it's enabled, and it persists after reboots (once logged in)... when I figured out my brand new keyboard still had several broken keys I started looking for S/W level issues. H…

What happened? What does mouse keys do?

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#228

Post by chaboud »

tgv wrote: post #170
cmehdy wrote: post #126

Three-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+[ke…

> all the accents and letters Nowadays, holding down a key will show a pop-up with all the accent options, which you can then select by mouse or by typing the number under it, much like on iOS. The option route is my preferred one, as it's faster, but the new one is much more accessible to people without keyboard prowess.

Is there a way to shut off the long press functionality? Sometimes I just want to type “byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”, and I have already made the effort to learn accent key combos.

Re: Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?

#230

Post by TaqPolymerase »

throwaway333444 wrote: post #8

Setting most (but not all) system preference using the terminal. It made doing clean installs every year so much easier. https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos

Do you have a good way of discovering these keys / syncing them with the UI? I like to do the same thing but sometimes change a setting in the UI and don’t know what to update in my script without diffing the entire prefs directory before and after the change.
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