Improve your interactions

Techniques to speed up all sorts of common tasks

The modern Mac offers a sense of fluid interaction thanks to Apple’s multitouch mice and trackpads. But even equipped with that wonderful technology, we often see friends doing things like resizing windows the slow way or unsure how to type certain characters, unaware that there are hidden shortcuts that’ll help them out.

So, here you’ll learn about several techniques that you might never have discovered unless you spend hours holding modifier keys and clicking and dragging things on your desktop. Build your muscle memory for these, especially the window resizing tips, and you’ll enjoy using your Mac even more.

17Another tiny icon trick

The icon mentioned in tip 11 serves up another shortcut. Need another file that you’ve stored alongside a document you have open? ≈-click the icon or the filename to reveal the path to the file; click any folder listed in this menu to open it in Finder.

18 Stop

In places like > System Prefs > Mission Control > Hot Corners, where you assign actions using pop-ups, hold any combo of ß, ≈, å and ç as you do. The combo then must be held to trigger the action – so, no accidental invocation!

20 Step aside, Spotlight

You can drag Spotlight’s window out of the way. The most reliable place to do this is the magnifying glass in the window. To reset the position, click and hold Spotlight’s menu bar icon.

19 Quickly switch mic

Need to switch mic when making FaceTime calls, say? In System Prefs’ Sound pane, add the speaker icon to the bar. Clicking the icon shows all the places your Mac can play sound to, but if you å-click it you’ll see input devices too.

21 Browse old backups

When a Time Machine drive gets full, you can connect a new drive and start over. Keep the old one; to browse its contents, hold å, click Time Machine’s menu bar icon and pick ‘Browse Other’.

22 Power up your trackpad

In typical fashion, Apple underplays the capabilities of its multi-touch mice and trackpads. They can recognise more than the few gestures shown in System Prefs. BetterTouchTool (about £7.50, folivora.ai) enables you to assign clicks, double-taps and swipes that involve three, four, five or more fingers to actions, like imitating key presses, toggling the pointer’s speed, and switching the front window to Split View (which then asks what to show opposite). Customisations can be restricted to specific apps, and the app also offers in-depth customisation of the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar.