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Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

thume.ca

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Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#121

Post by saagarjha »

rsync wrote: post #114

What I miss the most is a workable "focus follows mouse" solution. Circa Snow Leopard, I used "mondomouse" but that is abandonware and does not work. I tried to use "dwellclick" but it's not a good solution. I think there are now some new accessibility settings that actual enable a proper focus follows mouse in Mojave and later, but I don't have anything later than El Cap installed and am unable to test that ...

I've looked into this and the focus-follows-mouse part isn't actually all that difficult; there is SPI to do this. The difficulty is that picking what things should get focus is hard, because there are things in macOS that actually care about what is focused. For example, as I was running my test, from Xcode of course, I moved my cursor over the sidebar, which changed the focused item as I moved my mouse…of course, this had the effect of opening a different file. If anyone has any ideas on how do deal with this, I'd be happy to hear it!

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#122

Post by saagarjha »

shinycode wrote: post #113

I’ve been searching for a long time a tool that would resize all the windows open on a given space to fill up the entire screen. I open lots of things when working and that would be more useful than doing the exposé and switching back and forth do declutter. It seems to me that this feature is available on Windows and has been for a long time. I tried almost everything that I could google and I even bought apps that…

Hammerspoon can do this quite easily, just grab all the windows using hs.window.filter.defaultCurrentSpace:getWindows() and set each's frame to it's screen:frame().

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#123

Post by adav »

LanceH wrote: 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?

I'm not sure about speakers becoming microphones, but you can quickly select input and output devices by option+clicking the volume icon in the menu bar.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#125

Post by saagarjha »

jawngee wrote: post #104
lunixbochs wrote: post #74

If you use multiple monitors, and you're frustrated with the cmd-tab app switcher only appearing on the last monitor you touched the dock, this will make it show up on all monitors. defaults write com.apple.Dock appswitcher-all-displays -bool true killall Dock

You're a good person. That's been bugging me for years, but just a tad under bugging me enough that I'd take the time to solve it. Thank you!

Have a couple more, although they are purely eye candy:

  defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect -string suck
  defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#126

Post by password4321 »

trishume wrote: post #14
newsbinator wrote: post #8

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 resourc…

Have you tried https://hermesapp.org?

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#127

Post by jungletime »

I have a macbook which I partitioned and installed windows on. the macbook is in a drawer in a stand up desk. The desk has a terrible ergonomic design. So I ended up using the pullout drawer as a shelf form my external keyboard, which is rested on a board.

So my macbook is closed, inside a drawer, covered by a board, and connected to external monitor and keyboard.

1. How can I boot into windows from the mac desktop. Current procedure is to take off the board, open up the laptop, wait for startup, press a macbook key waiting for the os screen to start from which I can select windows icon. For some reason my external keyboard doesn't work during boot time. Its very annoying. Is there an app that will boot me into windows, from a mac desktop?

2. I have to shutdown the laptop at night because the fans are driving me crazy. But that means I have to pullout the macbook out of the drawer in the mornings, and open up the laptop to start it with a power button. Any apps that will put the macbook into sleep mode, that turn off the fans and external drives, quickly.

3. I miss cut and past for files the way it was on windows. This effectively moves them. Now I have to hold a key down and drag on a mac. Requires much more coordination, in selecting the destination folder. Is there anything equivalent to cut and paste on mac?

Thanks for any help.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#128

Post by maximilianroos »

missing_paren wrote: post #5

> cmd+backtick is like cmd+tab but between windows of the same app. Well, I wish that were completely true, because cmd+backtick only cycles through the windows of the application, while cmd+tab lets you select the application you want. From Ubuntu (or maybe rather Ubuntu's default desktop environment?) I am used to cmd+backtick allowing me to select the window - I did find an application that does enable this behavi…

Contexts hasn't had any updates in a while, but is still far and away better than anything else I've tried. There haven't been any regressions as MacOS has updated since the last version.

It's one of those "How did I manage before without this?" apps.

One of my favorite features is quick switching by holding down Caps and typing some of the Application / Window name. When releasing Esc, the selected window will be focused. So if you know the window you want to switch to, it's extremely fast.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#129

Post by kitsunesoba »

newsbinator wrote: post #8

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…

Apple should really consider surfacing this info to users and outing offending apps, much as they do with high energy consumption currently.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#130

Post by D-Coder »

JadeNB wrote: post #36
missing_paren wrote: post #5

> cmd+backtick is like cmd+tab but between windows of the same app. Well, I wish that were completely true, because cmd+backtick only cycles through the windows of the application, while cmd+tab lets you select the application you want. From Ubuntu (or maybe rather Ubuntu's default desktop environment?) I am used to cmd+backtick allowing me to select the window - I did find an application that does enable this behavi…

> > cmd+backtick is like cmd+tab but between windows of the same app. > Well, I wish that were completely true, because cmd+backtick only cycles through the windows of the application, while cmd+tab lets you select the application you want. I'm having trouble distinguishing between these two descriptions of the behaviour. What is different between what you say and what the author says?

Cmd-tab shows the row of open applications, you can tab through them (or shift-tab to go backwards), OR mouse over and click whichever app you want.

Cmd-backtick only cycles through the windows.

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