Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by jdub » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

etimberg wrote: post #19

nicoburns wrote: post #2

Wait 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

Shift + Command + 5… click "Options" in the bar down the bottom of the screen.

(Also, try hitting space a couple of times in that mode.)

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

#32

Post by throwaway413 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

nthState wrote: post #25

You can hover/long press on the green traffic light item to tile your screen.

literally just discovered this yesterday myself for the first time - still prefer Spectacle, but nice that it’s there.

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

#33

Post by hooda » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

Roybot wrote: post #10

Dictionary word lookup with a single gesture. https://media.giphy.com/media/Vg5tebSFuj1DFtHwrd/giphy.gif

Tap on a word with 3 fingers.

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

#34

Post by muli_d » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

You can delete files immediately (i.e., skip moving to the trash) in Finder by holding the Option key in addition to Command + Delete (or Backspace).

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

#35

Post by donatj » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #22

Focusing 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.

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

#36

Post by minxomat » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

shrumm wrote: post #24

my favourite feature is how the title bar icon in any app that’s editing a file (textmate/ word etc) is a pointer to the actual file unlike windows. - you can drag that file anywhere to move it. - CMD click it to see a breadcrumb menu showing where it is and navigate to the folder on a similar vein, dragging a file into an open file modal box makes it browse to the containing folder. In windows, dragging a file would…

Demos of all the drag and drop behavior can be seen in the Aqua keynote. Lots of people don’t know how powerful it is on macOS even though it was THE big feature at launch.

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

#37

Post by randomdata » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

That you can hold down certain keys, like i and o, to access a list of similar characters that aren't found on the keyboard.

My 1 year old taught me that one.

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

#38

Post by tonmoy » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

Solstinox wrote: post #16

Double click text to select a word. Triple click text to select the whole paragraph. For decades I assumed that there’s some weird fluky behavior when trying to select a word and accidentally selecting the paragraph.

This is same in Windows and Linux as well

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

#39

Post by david422 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

Hold down the option key when selecting text (in some editors) and it enables columnar selection. Can be very useful for certain editing tasks.

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

#40

Post by GolDDranks » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

Cmd-R (R for "reveal") in the open/save file dialog opens the present directory in Finder. This is useful as I commonly want to do some additional janitory tasks in the directory.