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Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

thume.ca

11–20 of 232 posts

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#11
>iTerm2: An alternative Terminal with just so many features. I particularly like the ability to split windows into panes, which Apple’s Terminal does not have.

Terminal actually has it, View -> Split Pane or Command-D - and has had it for ages (as well as tabs).

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#13
post #9
post #3

Author says Alfred is marginally better than Spotlight but I use it for so many different things. Doing quick math is a very common function for me. My favorite hidden trick is cmd+L which displays the typed text in HUGE fonts, so someone across the room can read it.

A few tips for Spotlight that made me stop using apps like Quicksilver and Alfred: 1. Typing something and pressing CMD+B will open a browser and do a Google search for that 2. Typing math works now 3. You can change your Spotlight preferences to not include files you don't wanna search on, essentially always showing apps (if you just want it do be an app launcher) Alfred does a lot more than this, but for me these w…

I just don't see the need when I can just open a new browser tab and type to search or launch the calculator app?

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#14

Spotify flashes non-stop (the left sidebar and the bottom control strip, but interestingly not the main app window). > Quartz Debug: There are some apps that reduce your battery life in an insidious way where it doesn’t show as CPU usage for their process but as increased WindowServer CPU usage. If your WindowServer process CPU usage is above maybe 6-10% when you’re not doing anything, some app in the background is p…

An app that was going to make it on my list was Anesidora, which is a native macOS Pandora player which of all the many music streaming apps I've tested including Apple Music, is the only one which uses less than 10% CPU total including on WindowServer and coreaudiod. Unfortunately since I got it the author seems to have removed it from the app store. There's some other native Pandora apps that might have low resource usage but I haven't tested them. I switched to Pandora for my music streaming mainly because of Anesidora, and luckily I still have it downloaded. Anesidora still redraws when it's hidden, but only once every second, and it uses lower CPU itself and in coreaudiod than other players.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#15
post #11

> iTerm2: An alternative Terminal with just so many features. I particularly like the ability to split windows into panes, which Apple’s Terminal does not have. Terminal actually has it, View -> Split Pane or Command-D - and has had it for ages (as well as tabs).

Terminal's split panes are a totally different thing than iTerm2's and IMO not very useful. Terminal can have multiple panes that all show different places in the same scrollback buffer, not different terminals. iTerm2 can have many different terminals within one tab, which I use for example to have a tab for a project with one pane ssh'd into a VM/server and another pane on my local machine for file munging and syncing.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#16
post #9
post #3

Author says Alfred is marginally better than Spotlight but I use it for so many different things. Doing quick math is a very common function for me. My favorite hidden trick is cmd+L which displays the typed text in HUGE fonts, so someone across the room can read it.

A few tips for Spotlight that made me stop using apps like Quicksilver and Alfred: 1. Typing something and pressing CMD+B will open a browser and do a Google search for that 2. Typing math works now 3. You can change your Spotlight preferences to not include files you don't wanna search on, essentially always showing apps (if you just want it do be an app launcher) Alfred does a lot more than this, but for me these w…

Spotlight’s math support is very rudimentary. I think I even found a bug in it recently trying to use “1e9” scientific notation.

I’ve found Google has the best calculator feature, which supports complex unit-aware inputs like “6 gigabytes / (7.1 mb/sec)”. Even Wolfram Alpha seems to get confused with some simple inputs.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#17
post #2

My tips: 1. Forget Finder, it is just bad for any power user scenario, and IMO worst part of Mac OS. Use Forklift or other similar app for all GUI file management operations. 2. Never drag and drop (this applies to any OS). Early release can cause all kinds of issues. 3. Make sure that you have fast access to Activity Monitor, since some GUI applications do not show any reasonable progress indicators when they start…

I've recently gone back to using Finder after a very brief dalliance with PathFinder [terrible processor and memory hog] and a fairly longer dalliance with ForkLift3.

Although I like a lot about ForkLift3, I had to ditch it eventually because its inability to set different view settings for different windows drove me insane.

Finder does allow this so, for example, I can have my ~/Downloads and ~/Pictures/Screengrabs folders set to always display in list view sorted by most recent [so the latest download or screengrab ia always at the top] whilst displaying other folders, such as /Applications in column view and alphabetically because I look for things in there by name.

My favourite Finder tip:

when saving a file and you want to base its name on an existing one, eg: myimage01.jpg, myimage02.jpg, myimage03.jpg... etc. Click on one of the existing files in the save dialogue and the untitled one you're about to save will adopt that name. Then you just change the last digit [or whatever] and save.

Favourite not particularly OSX specific tip: When including a date in your filenames, put it at the start in YYYY-MM-DD somefilename format. that way, sorting the column of files by name, also correctly sorts them by date.

Favourite not yet mentioned OSX utility: A Better Finder Rename [0] --bulk file renaming with more options and combinations than you can shake a stick at.

Favourite not yet mentioned OSX app: TextMate [1] --what Sublime Text hopes to be when it grows up!

[0] https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename

[1] https://macromates.com

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#18
post #3

Author says Alfred is marginally better than Spotlight but I use it for so many different things. Doing quick math is a very common function for me. My favorite hidden trick is cmd+L which displays the typed text in HUGE fonts, so someone across the room can read it.

Go to Accessibility settings and enable the zoom in shortcut. It lets you zoom in where the cursor is with a key press. Useful for checking small graphical details, reading tiny text and pointing something out to people. I use it all the time.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#19
post #2

My tips: 1. Forget Finder, it is just bad for any power user scenario, and IMO worst part of Mac OS. Use Forklift or other similar app for all GUI file management operations. 2. Never drag and drop (this applies to any OS). Early release can cause all kinds of issues. 3. Make sure that you have fast access to Activity Monitor, since some GUI applications do not show any reasonable progress indicators when they start…

1. This. The only thing I miss from Windows is Explorer. I just can't understand how macOS dev feels Finder would work like that for 20 years without much change. It resets the config and the window size for a folder at every random occasion, creates .DS_Store garbage all over, you cannot even cut files and just feels uneasy. I even enable "Quit Finder" menu and get it out of my app cycle list but it randomly resurrects itself...

ForkLift is something that keeps my sanity.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#20
post #12

When I turn off my bluetooth headphones osx switches my speaker to my microphone. Is there some hidden menu to disable this as an output device?

You might try the Audio MIDI Setup utility. This allows you to add/remove devices which might work to remove the microphone as an output device.

If you're looking for a fix and more advanced customization you could try Soundsource: https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/

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