Please share your hidden OS X features or tips and tricks

Question

Do you know any hidden or little-known nice feature of Mac OS X? It doesn't matter what it is—maybe just a short terminal command or a keyboard shortcut. Share your experiences on hidden Mac OS X features with us..

Please post one tip per answer. Please also check to see if your answer has already been posted - duplicate answers will be deleted. To search answers for this question use inquestion:400 (or inquestion:this, directly from the question page) in addition to your search terms in the search box in the upper right hand corner of this page.

Also provide details on how to achieve that feature, and if possible, include a relevant image too!

Answer 1

Most animations in OSX can be played in slow motion, when you hold ⇧. Works for example to slowly minimize windows if you click the minimize button while holding the ⇧ key.

Other examples are:

• toggle exposé
• toggle dashboard
• add/remove dashboard items
• all kinds of animations in Twitter for Mac

From: http://www.eeggs.com/items/29318.html

In MacOS X, while in the finder, open any window & click the minimizie button (yellow) at the top of the window while holding command+shift.

This will minimize the window in slow motion using the new "genie effect" minimize function of Mac OS X.

The CEO of Apple has shown this egg publicly several times. However, this egg is undocumented & has no system menu equivalent to use this feature. Anyone who has NOT followed the development of Mac OSX & watched the demos at the MacWorld trade shows would not realize this somewhat useless feature exists in Mac OSX.

Answer 2

In file open and file save dialogs: Hit ⌘+⇧+. to show all hidden files and folders.

Note that this appears to be true for any keyboard, no matter what ⇧+. on its own produces on that keyboard.

Answer 3

My favorite trick is using expose with drag and drop. Once you've started dragging something you can use the expose keyboard shortcut, switch to the app you want to drag it to, and drop it wherever it's needed. It's great for doing things like adding images to a presentation.

Answer 4

Pressing ⌥+fn will bring up the System Preference panel for that key. Here's a list:

• ⌥+Brightness: Displays
• ⌥+Exposé/Dashboard: Exposé and Spaces
• ⌥+Mute/Volume: Sound

Answer 5

• When typing text in any document or text field ⌥ Option+Backspace will delete the entire word, the same with ⌥ Option+Del which will delete the whole next word.

• Using an accented language? Press ⌃ Control+Backspace after an accented letter to delete just the accent, not the letter.

Answer 6

Disable Caps-Lock

The ability to disable the Caps-Lock key is wonderful (simply in the keyboard preferences, special keys). It is not really hidden, but I never need the key, but especially on my macbook I sometimes hit it by fault.

Some people also use this panel to replace Caps-Lock with Control. Especially useful when you're using Ctrl+A, Ctrl+E shortcuts a lot.

Answer 7

When you're ⌘+⇥ between running applications, if you press ⌥ before releasing command, it will raise minimized windows from the dock. Otherwise, you may be in an application, but without a raised window.

Also, while ⌘+⇥ goes to the right through the application list, ⌘+⇧+⇥goes left. ⌘+ backtick (`) also goes left.

ctrl+⌥+⌘-8 inverts the screen. Sometimes useful for whacky lighting situations, especially with glossy screens.

Answer 8

Have a laptop? ⌥+Click BatterySymbol in menu bar to view your battery's condition

via @Mactip

Answer 9

In iTunes pressing ⌘ + L brings you to the song playing right now.

Helpful if you lost yourself in your collection or are in iTunes Store and want to change something real quick.

Answer 10

Use widget in Desktop:

This allows you to drag widgets out of Dashboard onto the desktop. Requires the dock to be relaunched to take effect, so type "killall Dock" and press enter. Now, if you click and hold onto a widget in the dashboard and press F4 to return to the desktop, the widget won't disappear with the rest.

If you want get it back to dashboard click it and press f4 (show dashboard) and release widget

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

Answer 11

On any open file or save file dialog instead of searching for the file, you can grab any from the finder...

And drop it in the window to select it!

This little trick has saved me hours in looking for files to be opened. You can also drop files directy on the file fiedls of any webpage.

Specially useful tricks when you have files on your desktop or a finder window! Hope it helps!

Answer 12

This isn't really a "feature", just a way to customize OS X, but I still think it's useful:

You can edit the icons used by OS X at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources

You can also change the login screen to your liking here

/System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/loginwindow.bundle/Contents/Resources

There are so many ways to customize OS X... the dock, for example (/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources)

And you don't really need to "resource hack" anything: just backup and change a couple png or tif files!

Answer 13

It's always worth pressing Alt when a menu is posted, as some menu items will change to offer previously-hidden options. For example:

• In Safari, File>Close Window and File>Close Tab become Close All Windows and Close all Tabs.
• In iTunes, File>Find Duplicates becomes File>Find Exact Duplicates, and Advanced>Create MP3 Version becomes Advanced>Convert to MP3...
• In Mail.app, Edit->Add Link... becomes Edit->Remove Link.
• In Finder right-click menu, Get Info becomes Show Inspector, and Keep Arranged By becomes Arrange By.
• On the Window menu in any application, Minimize, Zoom, and Bring All to Front become Minimize All, Zoom All, and Arrange in Front.

Answer 14

Photo Booth:

Hold ⌥ to skip countdown and take immediate photo.

Hold ⇧ to disable the screen flash.

via @Mactip

Answer 15

⌘ + click on the title bar at the top of a Safari window to get a menu of URLs, each the same as the previous but with the last path component removed. Like this:

Answer 16

When clicking from one application's window to another's, holding down ⌥ while clicking will automatically hide the former app's windows.

Answer 17

hold down ctrl and ⇧ while mousing over the dock to toggle magnification on-demand.

Answer 18

• Hold down the ⌘ key to drag a background window by it's title bar without focussing it and bringing it to front

• ⌥-click in a scrollbar's empty space to scroll to the clicked place (instead of scrolling up or down one page). You can switch this behavior in the Appearance panel of System Preferences.

• ⌘-click on the name of a page in Safari's title bar to show the URL path as a menu. Select to browse (this is the same as ⌘-clicking the title in document windows).

Answer 19

Have a menu command/keyboard shortcut that you know exists, but you can't find it (or just don't want to touch your mouse)?

Press ⌘-⇧-/ to get to the help menu. It'll pop up the help menu that you can type into. Type the word you want to search the menus for, then ↓ to the menu item you want. OSX will helpfully show you where that item exists in the menu with a big blue arrow and you'll also see any associated shortcuts.

Answer 20

Hold down ⌥ and click TimeMachine Icon in the menubar. Now you can search/restore from other backups

via @MacTip

Answer 21

I still think ⌘ + ⌥ + ⇧ + v (paste without style) is very handy.

That is, when something is on the clipboard and has unwanted styles along for the ride, this keyboard shortcuts lets you paste just the plain text without any formatting.

Answer 22

You can change screen brightness in quarter intervals using this combination:

⌥ + ⇧ + Brightness Up / Down

Answer 23

⌘ + ⇧ + . will show hidden files in any file-open dialog box.

Answer 24

I avoid using the mouse, so I like to start applications using Spotlight. You can launch Spotlight by pressing ⌘ + space. Once Spotlight is launched, type in application name and press enter.

So to start Safari without using the mouse, type: ⌘ + space -> "Safari" -> ↩

Answer 25

Dialogs usually have two useful actions accessible from the keyboard. ↩ performs the default action (Save, in the image below) and space performs the secondary action (Don't Save, in the image below).

Answer 26

Option ⌥-click menulets to bring up extra information. I use this all the time!

Battery Menulet:

Airport Menulet:

Bluetooth Menulet:

Sound Menulet:

Answer 27

I really like the way of MacOS modifies the letter spacing of the fonts when resizing a pane. As long as the spacing can be decreased, the title won't be truncated.

Example:

Answer 28

When you use ⌘ + ⇥ to switch tabs, you can continue to hold ⌘ down and drag a file into any icon in the bezel.

Combined with the trick of dragging from the proxy icon in the menubar, this is a powerful way to open a file in another application, especially if you rarely use your dock.

Answer 29

It’s possible to enable AirDrop on unsupported (older) Macs running Lion by entering a single command in Terminal.app:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces -bool true

This also enables AirDrop over Ethernet (not just WiFi). (CableDrop™?)

Don’t forget to logout and login again, or reboot your Mac after entering the command.

Disclaimer: This is just one of the many goodies in my .osx file.

Answer 30

If you hold down option while resizing the Dock, it will resize in multiples of 16 pixels.