Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 540 posts

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

#381

Post by awinder »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #325
awinder wrote: post #166

I’ve been using windows more recently since my personal Mac bit the dust and I’m trying to decide if there’s really that much reason to own a personal Mac. So now I realize for years I’ve been using this silent feature of macs for years called “not totally jacked up font rendering”. I would never have imagined this was a feature, but apparently there is a collective insanity in windowsland where the quality of font r…

I recently made the switch from Mac to Windows and have been using MacType - https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype to ease the transition.

Did you just use defaults or one of the profiles? Will mess with this thanks for the tip!

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

#384

Post by hinkley »

frankjr wrote: post #68

Smart Folders (Finder -> File -> New Smart Folder). It's not exactly hidden but I never paid too much attention to it. It's essentially a way to create a folder whose content is dynamically updated based on your search conditions. For example, you can create a smart folder that contains all PDF files matching a certain name pattern within a given directory (or the whole disk) [0]. You can get really advanced, there's…

I wonder if that’s how they implemented smart playlists for iTunes.

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

#385

Post by projektfu »

ntauthority wrote: post #136
browningstreet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strange name/label for an awesome feature.

It'd make sense if the label were actually "Stationery", which is practically a paper template.

It should be Stationery. At least it was back in System 7.

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

#386

Post by DavideNL »

1. Accessibility > Zoom > "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom" > Ctrl

So you press "Ctrl" and then scroll down on the trackpad and it will zoom in anywhere/on anything. Use it quite often and love it :)

2. Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad options > Enable dragging > Without dragg lock

This one takes some time getting used to but it's awesome once you get the hang of it

3. Control–Shift–Power button

To put the display to sleep

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

#387

Post by projektfu »

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…

I also like how you can usually rename or move an open file and the app that has it open updates itself.

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

#388

Post by ninkendo »

maxioatic wrote: post #114

Cmd + tab to quit applications Instead of releasing cmd to switch to the application, you can press q to quit it.

You can use the mouse to hover over entries while keeping Cmd held down, and q will quit whatever your mouse is over.

Useful for "I just want to quit every app": just move the mouse left and right over the icons while pressing Q repeatedly until everything's dead.

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

#389

Post by pwinnski »

mi_lk wrote: post #377
Gaelan wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try changing the default in Safari, on the theory that it might use that as some sort of “system search engine”? Failing that, it’s probably just hardcoded.

Changed and it's still Google. Yeah the search string is probably hardcoded :(

Definitely uses Safari + Duck Duck Go for me. It appears that it just "types" the string into Safari's search bar, so whatever that does is what it does.

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

#390

Post by jdm2212 »

tbodt wrote: post #366
jdm2212 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really neat trick! Worth noting: Chrome actually no longer dies when you fat-finger cmd-w. It shows a "hold cmd-q to quit" overlay and only dies if you keep holding the keys down.

That's a setting you enable in the app menu, not the default

Is it? Oh man, must've been a long time since I enabled it. They should make it the default.
Post reply on HN