Dec 20, 2021
Tips and Tricks to be More Productive With Your Mac
Easy steps that you could follow for a greater Mac experience.
If you’re a Mac user, you should be familiar with Mac shortcuts, gestures and hidden features. Because it will always help you to achieve a great user experience and having known tips and tricks on your Mac can support you to be more productive with your Mac.
In this post, I talk about tips and tricks that you can apply in many areas on your Mac. Let’s get started.
Tips for Terminal
Change default shell to zsh.
The Terminal is one of the most useful applications on Mac, and it helps users in many ways. With the Mac OS Catalina update, zsh became the default interactive shell.
Before this update, Mac users use the Bash shell, as their default shell. Using a couple of commands, users can easily change the shell from bash to zsh and vice versa.
chsh -s /bin/zshOpen your Terminal and type the above command and enter your password as it asked after you press enter. Then quit the Terminal, then reopen and paste the code below to ensure you’ve successfully changed the shell to zsh.
echo $SHELLPress enter, and if you get /bin/zsh, you’ve done it successfully. If you want to change your shell back to bash, use the following command on Terminal.
chsh -s /bin/bashCreating files using Terminal
As I said before, the Terminal helps you to do many tasks with just a few commands. You can create a file in your desired location and insert data into it via the Terminal with a single command.
Suppose we need to create a text file on a Mac desktop; first, you need to navigate to the desktop within the Terminal. Use cd [change directory] commands to navigate Terminal to your location and then enter the command as follows.
echo Sample Text > NewFile.txtSample Text is the data that you need to enter into the file, and NewFile.txt is the file name and format of the file.
Customise user preferences.
You don’t need to stick to the default Terminal settings. You are always capable of changing it according to your preferences.
To increase the font size of the Terminal use the command and (+) key together and to decrease the font size, you can use the command and (-) key together.
Also, you can change the background colour, font style, windows dimensions and many more. Go to Terminal > preferences in the menu bar to customise the Terminal according to your preferences.
Clear the Terminal
If you wish to clear the Terminal and start from the beginning or you need to remove the previous commands on the Terminal and get a new window, use control + L to clear the Terminal rather than opening a new window or reopening the Terminal.
Delete files using keyboard shortcuts
In the usual scenario, you need to select the relevant files/folders, then right-click and have to select Move to Bin.
But when you need to delete a file, multiple files or folder/folders, use command + delete keys. Then they will directly move to your Bin, and you can empty the Bin when you need to do so.
Use Go to the folder: prompt box for navigation within Finder
To go to a specific location in Finder, use command + shift + g and enter your location on Go to the folder: prompt box.
Use Force Quit instead of Shutdown & Restart.
Sometimes we don’t get the expected response from an application or maybe nothing at all. On such occasions, you can use Force Quit instead of shutting down or restarting your Mac.
Force Quit will quit the operation of that particular app and allow the user to work on other apps and reopen that app once again.
Therefore, if you don’t get a response from an application for a while, you can force quit that application using command + option + escape.
Remove Suggestions on Chrome
Even though Mac comes with a Safari browser, many users still use Chrome as their default browser. But if you’re using Apple Handoff, then Safari should be your default browser.
Chrome usually suggest users with previously used usernames, emails on the browser to enhance the user experience. But sometimes users get distracted from irrelevant Chrome suggestions such as usernames or emails which do not relevant to particular user login, credentials that you are no longer using on the Internet.
In such scenarios, select the username or email that you want to remove and press shift + fn + delete on the keyboard.
Taking a screenshot of your Touch Bar
Have you ever tried capturing your Touch Bar? Having introduced a Touch Bar on MacBooks, Apple changed the whole user experience of using laptops.
We all capture the Mac screen regularly, but we rarely think of capturing the Touch Bar. But when you need to capture your Touch Bar use command + shift + 6 to take a screenshot of your Touch Bar.
Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a response below.
