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

Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

thume.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 232 posts

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#201

Post by arafsheikh »

reaperducer wrote: post #25
arafsheikh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A free alternative to BTT trackpad gestures is jitouch2 ( https://www.jitouch.com ). It's not as versatile and no longer maintained, but works well for most use cases even in the latest version of MacOS.

Thanks for the recommendation. I paid for BTT, and find it very unstable. More often than not the custom snap windows function just doesn't work. That's the only reason I bought it. I used to be able to restart BTT and snapping would work again, but that is no longer effective in the latest version. I guess the fact that it even has a "restart" option in its drop-down menu should have been a hint.

Check out Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com) for window snapping. It's open source and I've had no issues with it.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#202

Post by peterhil »

Some hard to find tips that are a bit old (tested on OS X Lion), but most of them still work: https://software.clapper.org/cheat-sheets/mac-os-x.html

For me, an immediately useful tip was hiding user login for Git user.

I would add the following tips to above article:

# System resource usage

* USE Method: Mac OS X Performance Checklist: http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-macosx.html

# Emacs users

* For Emacs users with their config in version control, I would recommend downloading the latest Emacs.app version 27.1 instead of using Aquamacs, because Aquamacs has a bunch of customizations that do not play so well with original Emacs.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

# Printing

* If you have Acrobat or Acrobat Professional installed, add an Adobe PDF printer from System Preferences > Printers and scanners, so you can make better PDF files by printing from any application.

* You can save anything as PDF by choosing "Save as PDF" from the dropdown on the lower left corner on any print dialog.

* Open CUPS web UI by opening the following URL in a web browser:

http://localhost:631/ http://localhost:631/printers/

You may need to enable the web user interface by issuing:

cupsctl WebInterface=yes

Warning! Be sure that you are behind NAT or a firewall so as not to expose the web UI to internet!

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#205

Post by speleding »

eyesee wrote: post #57

Surprised no one has mentioned QuickLook. In Finder, select a file (document, image, movie, etc.) and tap the space bar to bring up QuickLook. You’ll see a full preview of that document instantly. The preview window follows your focus, so you can use mouse arrow keys to navigate between files, etc and see an updated preview. Also works in Open dialogs, Mail attachments and elsewhere.

Spotlight is great but by default it will only do extensions it knows about, and will ignore text files like .css and most source code files.

There is a plugin called qlstephen that allows you to spotlight all text files (but it's a bit of a pain to install on Catalina due to permissions issues): https://github.com/whomwah/qlstephen

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#206

Post by xenadu02 »

JonathonW wrote: post #178
jshier wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your last point, would that include the jenkins-agent.jar file? If so, is there a way to dynamically add it? We download our agent jars on boot which I'm pretty sure would replace the preview permission, so it'd be great to add it after download.

The Developer Tool permission excludes a process's child processes from scanning, not the process itself, so you'd have to add whatever launches the Jenkins agent, not the agent JAR itself. That's probably either ssh or launchd; adding a blanket exception to either of those is probably undesirable (if macOS will let you do it at all).

Usually you have something configured as a LaunchDaemon or LaunchAgent. Put that process in the list so once it goes out and downloads the jar then executes it you're good.

I don't recommend putting java in the list. That would grant that power to all Java apps (or at least all that start through that copy of Java).

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#207

Post by maximilianroos »

mindfulhack wrote: post #188
maximilianroos wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

A new app 'AltTab' has fast overtaken Contexts as a much loved alternative: https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos

I just checked it out, thanks for the link. This shows promise!

But I don't really need the images of the windows, a list is much more efficient than a 5x3 grid of large images. And the quick switch esc+key is sorely missed.

I'll keep an eye on it though, thanks again for the rec.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#208

Post by astrostl »

chime wrote: 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.

Custom web search keywords alone are an absolute game-changer for me.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#209

Post by runamok »

kmundnic wrote: post #152
WantonQuantum wrote: post #150

My tip: System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver -> Screen Saver -> Hot Corners -> Bottom Left Corner (or whichever you prefer) -> Put Display To Sleep (or Lock Screen if you prefer).

You can also lock the screen with control + command + Q. I always bump into the corners so I prefer a key combination.

You can also add a lock icon to the touch bar.

Re: Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS

#210

Post by gjvnq »

luizfelberti wrote: post #77

Does anyone have a tip to keep macOS from phoning home when you run unsigned binaries? I almost locked up my entire computer this week, presumably because of this... here's the story for that: I had setup unbound listening on 127.0.0.1:53 as the only DNS resolver for all network interfaces, so that I hijack several responses that I might want to (e.g. adnet sinkholes) and forward the rest to Google/Cloudflare over TL…

I think that the real question is: how to fool macOS into thinking all binaries are signed?

In theory it should be possible to patch the function that checks for signatures, but I have no idea if anyone has actually tried it.

Post reply on HN