4 macos tips that will turn you into a power user

Transform your workflow with these easy settings and tweaks. Michael Simon reports

We write lots of complicated howtos and in-depth buying guides here at Macworld, but sometimes we just want to quickly tell you about our favourite tricks and tips that take mere seconds to use but will save you lots of time and frustration.

1. SHAKE TO FIND YOUR CURSOR

If you’ve ever lost your mouse in a sea of windows and spent tens of seconds trying to find it, you’ll wonder where this trick has been your whole life. Go to the Accessibility pane in System Preferences, then Display, and finally Cursor. Make sure the ‘Shake

mouse pointer to locate’ checkbox is selected. Now, you’ll be able to quickly move your mouse or your finger over the trackpad for a second or two to briefly enlarge your cursor so you can quickly spot it.

2. BRING THE SCROLL BARS BACK

A few generations ago, Apple decided to clean up the interface by removing the scroll bars from the right edge of windows. They magically appear and disappear when you start scrolling, but if you want to quickly grab a scroll bar and move to a specific point in a browser or document, it’s tricky and not very intuitive. But you can turn them back on. Head over to the General pane in System Preferences and you’ll see an Always option under the Show scroll bars section. It may look weird at first if you’ve been living without them for a while, but you’ll get over that the first time you instinctively grab a scroll bar and swiftly move through a lengthy web page.

3. USE YOUR CORNERS

Mac veterans know all about the usefulness of Hot Corners, but if you’re new to the Mac, you might not have stumbled upon the feature yet. To find it, go to the Desktop & Screen Saver pane in System Preferences, click on the Screen Saver tab, and select Hot Corners at the bottom. A pop-up window will appear with dropdown menus for each of the corners of your screen. You can select from nine options, including Start Screen Saver, Put Display to Sleep, and

Lock Screen, as well as a few other

Hot Corners in macos lets you apply a variety of actions when you move your cursor into one of the corners of your screen.