Control your Mac: Power tips

Time to go under the hood, using Terminal commands and Activity Monitor to fine-tune your Mac experience.

>>>USE TERMINAL

The Terminal app is found in Applications > Utilities. Launch it and you get an old-school, text-based terminal for manually typing in commands – which can include those that adjust hidden macOS preferences. Let’s dig into some…

>>>REVERT FINDER TITLE BARS

Big Sur radically changed title bars, leaving a smaller draggable area and hiding proxy icons. The following command brings the old design back: defaults write com.apple.finder NSWindowSupportsAutomaticInlineTitle -bool false && killall Finder.

Switch false to true to revert.

>>>ADJUST THE DOCK

When apps are hidden, make their Dock icon semi–transparent with this command: defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool yes && killall Dock. You can also make a hidden dock instantly appear when you move the cursor to a screen edge with this: defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0 && killall Dock. (The defaults for these two settings are, respectively, no and 0.5.)

>>>FINE–TUNE FILE EXTENSIONS

Finder hides file extensions by default, but you can show them all with this: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true && killall Finder. Note this will include things you’re not used to seeing, such as .app for applications and .webloc for web locations dragged from Safari. (False reverts.) You can also stop your Mac warning you whenever you attempt to change a document’s file extension by using this command: defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableExtensionChangeWarning -bool false && killall Finder. (And of course, true reverts.)