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macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

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Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#161

Post by tcoff91 »

daggersandscars wrote: post #47
nomilk wrote: post #20

Love that this is straight to the point. My tips: - Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > ), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workfl…

> There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer) I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.

Aerospace tiling window manager is amazing

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#162

Post by tcoff91 »

hedayet wrote: post #57
nomilk wrote: post #20

Love that this is straight to the point. My tips: - Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > ), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workfl…

I've been using the Amethyst window manager for ~10 years. It's open-source and generally works well, though it occasionally requires a restart (the app, not the OS)

You should check out aerospace, much better than amethyst or yabai IMO

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#163

Post by zdragnar »

theshrike79 wrote: post #144
nomilk wrote: post #20

Love that this is straight to the point. My tips: - Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > ), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workfl…

I just made my own window manager with Hammerspoon. First I copied whatever rectangle/magnet was doing and then added my own logic on top of it to fit the style I work with windows. As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected. And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even ha…

I did the same, though I'd modeled my setup after my prior swaywm workflow. Hammerspoon was really the only thing that made macos usable for me.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#164

Post by tcoff91 »

iamsaitam wrote: post #149
barrell wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to recommend aerospace. It’s been amazing. My whole desktop is like a tmux session now. It’s very much changed how I work/use my computer. More than Rectangle did, more than LLMs have. (I still adore hookshot/rectangle though :)

What does aerospace provide that yabai can't? I'm using yabai pretty much like I used to in Arch with i3

Aerospace is much better than yabai especially workspaces feature without disabling SIP

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#165

Post by kartikey30 »

nomilk wrote: post #20

Love that this is straight to the point. My tips: - Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > ), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workfl…

I have found simple hammerspoon scripts to be a great alternative to a windows manager. You can map keys to some parts of the screen. It also supports multi-display systems.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#166

Post by miki123211 »

And I'll add:

cmd+opt+shift+esc force quits the current app (cmd+opt+esc opens the force quit window, as the former doesn't work sometimes).

Cmd+q quits the current app, and, when command is held and we're cycling through apps with cmd+tab, it quits the currently selected app. If you need to quit multiple apps at once, hold cmd, press tab to select the apps to quit, and just quit them with q.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#167

Post by thomasstuttard »

mherrmann wrote: post #67

My favorites: To quickly find text, select some text and press ⌘E followed by ⌘G. In save dialogs, press ⌘= to switch between the compact and expanded layout. In save dialogs, press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory. Hold Option while opening the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth menus to access extra options. After copying a file, press ⌥⌘V to mov…

How do you exit the find text, selection mode (⌘E, ⌘G)? I have tried pressing the escape key, with no luck.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#168

Post by urxvtcd »

annnoo wrote: post #96
nomilk wrote: post #20

Love that this is straight to the point. My tips: - Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > ), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workfl…

Have you tried out aerospace as window manager ( https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace ) ? I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this

AeroSpace is really nice, when it works. As soon as I use more of CPU, for example to compile something, it gets unusably slow, as in 5 seconds to do anything slow. The worst part is that the workspaces are virtual, so when you kill it, you're left with a tens of pixel-sized windows in Mission Control.

So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#169

Post by urxvtcd »

tcoff91 wrote: post #164
iamsaitam wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does aerospace provide that yabai can't? I'm using yabai pretty much like I used to in Arch with i3

Aerospace is much better than yabai especially workspaces feature without disabling SIP

I'm using yabai with SIP enabled. The only thing that is missing is sending a window to another workspace. To do that I launch Mission Control and simply drag the window to desired workspace. It turns out I don't do that often so I can live with that.

Re: macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

#170

Post by colddevil »

danielvaughn wrote: post #138
tannhaeuser wrote: post #108

All I want is an app that can fix the "broken window" focus management. Like when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app, and when an app (say, Finder) has no window open currently, bringing it to front also unaskedly manipulates the stacking order such that other app's windows become the top most one, completely destroying the visual context. Also, back in the days I used Expose a l…

I just want a Finder that actually works. It’s pretty incredible just how bad Finder is. It’s by far the worst piece of software I’m forced to use on a daily basis.

Yes, I was thinking the same.. For several years, I'm pretty happy with PathFinder by Cocoatech: https://cocoatech.io/

The things I miss the most when I accidentically open a Finder window: Cut files wit CMD+X to move them (never understood this when coming from Windows), cycle the files in a folder (start on top if you reach bottom and vice versa) and the comprehensive info bar on the right for files and folders. Give it a try :)

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