I was recently talking to a colleague about my experience, in which I went from being on windows 75% of the time (Mac 25%) to Mac 75% and Windows 25%. This was a huge relief for me and made things much easier, but he commented on how he can't stand working on MacOS.
It's lists like these that remind me that I have sanded off a lot of the rough edges in MacOS to make it so comfortable, and those who are unwilling/unable or don't know how can be met with frustration from MacOS.
> It's lists like these that remind me that I have sanded off a lot of the rough edges in MacOS to make it so comfortable, and those who are unwilling/unable or don't know how can be met with frustration from MacOS.
The same can be done about virtually any OS (including Windows) to make it suck less. But none of them are advertised as the most easy-to-use OS.
Yes, AltTab is quite useful, especially the feature which allows you to switch to other apps by "hovering" your mouse on their icon when pressing OPTION+TAB.
For starters, you need to remember whether you're switching to a different application (cmd-tab), or a different window of the same application (cmd-` ???).
It's annoying, but it totally goes to shit when you start using multiple spaces/desktops. Now cmd-tab sometimes switches to applications that aren't even open on your desktop (or sometimes it switches to other desktops). Just a total disaster of an interface.
On top of this, fullscreened windows go to some ephemeral desktop/space, which confuses the heck out of new users. I cannot believe that the Mac interface is considered "clean" or "well thought out."
Aha. Well, I've never used multiple spaces/desktops, so never had those problems.
Q. What do you do on Linux instead of having to remember "whether you're switching to a different application (cmd-tab), or a different window of the same application (cmd-` ???)" ? I don't know the way you're used to doing it, so it's impossible for me to assess your claims.
> On top of this, fullscreened windows go to some ephemeral desktop/space
I'd never CMD-TABed a fullscreened window before - not sure why you would want to do that, and I very rarely use fullscreen - so I never came across that! Tried doing it now - yeah, I had no idea where my fullscreen CMD-TABed firefox went or how to get it back (although New Tab worked)... So I googled it: under System Preferences->Keyboard->Mission Control->Shortcuts there are 3 shortcuts for move space right, left and go to desktop 1, which I activated, so if that ever happens I will hopefully remember what to do. Thanks, I learnt something :-)
On Linux you don't switch between the windows of a specific app OR between apps (which ignores the individual Windows of each app). Instead, its approach is to treat all windows as complete distinct. "Alt+Tab" can cycle between windows on the current display, and ignore windows on any other display. Task bars (eg XFCE) can do the same: show a list of windows that are on its display.
You can group windows from the same app too, if you've got lots of windows open.
Ah thanks! So you would kind of have to use desktops/spaces then. That does just seem a different system rather than obviously better or worse.
Also, my long-time mac-using SO tells me she used to use spaces but found them counterproductive, so turned them off altogether, so maybe that's a good idea for people who run into problems with them when moving to macs.
What bothers you about it? Are you expecting it to switch between windows of an application? You use cmd` for that in Mac OS. I’d rather have them separate otherwise it becomes too large a “search space”.
Edit: ok, so this is just a window switcher. Which I will install because I don't like the default one.
Old reply, which assumed this was a keyboard shortcut app:
Does it consistently work across all apps? Because I've gone the way of manually configuring keyboard shortcuts, but it seems like I have to do it in several places, and some apps still misbehave (particularly navigating through text with CTRL, shift, pgup, pgdown, home, end)
I just scanned an invoice to pdf via a Brother MFC printer/scanner, and I cannot highlight any of the text in it in Preview. How can I run OCR on this document in Preview? I do not see any menu option or anything in Help menu.
Only works on latest macOS. Also you have to wait a bit for the OCR to take place and there are no indication whatsoever the system is working on it. When it’s done, you can simply select the text.
I have had this pdf open in Preview for 30+ min in the latest macOS. I think this is the Live Text functionality mentioned in other comments, but it does not work on PDFs, only images and whatnot.
“As the OS unbidden installed the update with the latest restrictions and spyware, I asked it ‘Why did you do this? Now I will switch to another, less usable, operating system! We will both be worse off!’ And it replied ‘It’s in my nature.’”
How to make macOS remember each app’s input source? There are some setting, they don’t really work. It’s my only serious problem with the best OS around. Can anyone make an app to fix this? Thanks!
Interesting. I've always preferred the input source to be global rather than scoped-to-app. I can remember one input source but I can't remember for every open app, so I always know whether I have to switch.
Are you switching between English and some other Latin alphabet language? Or non-Latin?
Switching to Bulgarian in Notes, then switching to another app (where the focus isn't on an input field) and the new app gets Bulgarian input, which prevents me from controlling it by keyboard.
Would it be solved with a simple macro such that Ctrl+F2 (i.e. switch to menu bar, which is the way I mostly start to interact with UI using the keyboard) automatically reverted to Latin alphabet input? Hypothetically speaking.
Out of curiosity, what's your workflow look like that you're ending up with so many "dirty" screenshots that it wants to know if it should save or not?
(AFAIK there's no mass-discard option, but I've never really thought about it before because 99% of the time Preview is showing me something that's already on disk)
> Out of curiosity, what's your workflow look like that you're ending up with so many "dirty" screenshots that it wants to know if it should save or not?
Yes, screenshot part of the screen, do a quick edit or highlight in Preview, and paste it to GitHub or email. I never want the screenshots to be saved to disk but end up with my Preview full of "dirty" screenshots.
That’s too much work and a distraction to try to manage those files while I’m doing screenshots. Easier just to take them and move on. I have them saved to a “screenshots” folder and occasionally purge that.
Option-click on a window's red close button closes all open windows/documents in a macOS app, but I don't know of a "delete all" shortcut, so (unfortunately) all unsaved documents will get a confirmation dialog in their window where you have to click the delete button.
There used to be command key shortcuts for the don't save/cancel/save (command-d/s/c iirc?) dialog buttons, but they've changed the ui to delete/save and seem to have removed the keyboard equivalents.
The right way to do it (in my opinion) would be option-click on the Delete button or command-option-D, but they don't seem to have implemented that.
> There used to be command key shortcuts for the don't save/cancel/save (command-d/s/c iirc?) dialog buttons, but they've changed the ui to delete/save and seem to have removed the keyboard equivalents.
Command-d is still mapped to don't save (at least in Preview, just verified). Escape is cancel.
Indeed, esc for Cancel and return/enter for Save still work - (which I actually knew, verified yesterday, and should probably have updated my post to mention before the annoying HN edit cutoff.)
Are you running macOS Monterey? It doesn't seem to have a Don't Save option in the "Do you want to keep this new document" dialog box - it's Delete, and command-d does not work for me.
My issue with the first one is that modern Xcode releases take forever to install on 128 GB macbooks. It wasn't like that at all in the past. A 128 GB macbook pro was an entry-level model, but you could comfortably install Xcode in an hour maximum. Now I had to leave it open for the nigh. Just to update to a minor version. This basically means I can hardly use it for anything else.
https://github.com/RobotsAndPencils/xcodes can install Xcode in a few minutes (plus however long it takes to download). Be sure to enable the experimental option to extract using unxip.
Yes, it's absurd that you need a third-party application to install Xcode.
> Apple has shipped a slow, incomprehensible scripting language for as long as I have been aware of them
Apple's Open Scripting Architecture is something like 30 years old at this point. Macs have been scriptable using JavaScript for more than 20 years (JavaScript OSA, 2001), and JXA has been included in macOS since 2013.
AppleScript may have been something of a failure, but HyperTalk (which it was based on) was a huge success.
Personally I like AppleScript, even if I mainly use Python (and occasionally JavaScript) for scripting macOS and iOS. Now I want to try Late Night Software's Script Debugger 8, which looks like a nice IDE for AppleScript.
Last I checked the javascript documentation for OSA was pretty incomplete. I needed to script something on a mac the other year and had to use AppleScript because I couldn't figure out how to do something extremely basic (like get a hash out of some app or something, I don't remember.)
> also me: all OSes should just have ffmpeg preinstalled. so we don't relearn these encoding commands over and over again.
Have you seen what happens when Apple preinstalls a useful open source utility? You're lucky if you get one update per decade. Also, if Apple preinstalled ffmpeg, it's going to be limited to only codecs (and maybe containers?) that aren't going to get Apple sued, probably not even the ones they've licensed for system use, so I hope you like 90s codecs.
It's strictly better for Apple/etc to make it simpler to install MacPorts or fink or brew or whatever other package manager is cool today and let you install that and the packages you like, preferably without requiring xcode, because xcode is big.
Seriously, if Apple aren't financially supporting Homebrew, they're nuts. I'd have thrown my M1 out the window long ago if it weren't for brew. All GNU apps are aliased as defaults in my shell (ggrep, gtar, gsed etc)
How do you make it put windows on the same screens after a wake up or an unplug?
Sometimes I want to carry my laptop around, and I want my windows in a particular way. When I plug in my screens again, I want them back again in the multiscreen setup.
This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. So eventually I end up having to move the windows to other screens, maximize, etc before I can get on with my work.
You'd think there was a way where it could remember what was plugged in and restore as appropriate.
1. Why can't windows remember their positions when using multiple screens? Is it a bug in the OS or a bug in the App (because some apps seem to work better than others?)
2. Why does Finder search suck so bad? I generally find it easier to drop to a command line and use 'find' rather than use Finder. Finder in general kinda sucks.
3. Why doesn't the Always Open With option on the Other... submenu seem to work?
4. Why does Exposé not work half the time? I have many applications with many windows open for each. I don't want to use Mission Control to select the window, I want to use Exposé. Half the time Exposé just gives me the desktop. Not what I want.
#3 is super annoying - but also why can't I bulk edit associations?
Parallels decided to install Windows Media Player as my media player for all music and video file types on macOS and I want to reset all of them to VLC.
> #3 is super annoying - but also why can't I bulk edit associations?
You can.
Right Click -> Open With -> Other... (Always open with checkbox)
is for setting a particular association for the particular file you right-clicked (maybe you always want this file to open in Sublime, but this other one with the same extension in TextEdit, for some reason, etc).
command-I to open the Get Info pane -> expand Open With block -> use dropdown labelled "Use this application to open all documents like this one" -> click Change All... button
On Windows you can do things like set an application for all media files. Or choose which file types that VLC supports that it should open.
On macOS you have to modify every single file type by hand - which also requires a file of that type to operate on. It should be in System Preferences instead.
Select multiple files with different extensions > hold [Control] and right click > Get Summary Info > Open with (select all) > click [Change All...].
The files don't need to be valid, just have the extension you want to associate, so you can do something like `touch _.mp3 _.mp4 _.m4a _.mkv` then select those files and set them all at once.
For 2), it’s because Finder only ever looks for things indexed by Spotlight. So it could be Spotlight lagging behind (that’s the ‘mdworker’ I’m sure you’ve seen many times hogging cpu), the Spotlight importer for that file type failing, or even just Spotlight deciding not to index various folders by default :(
Off the top of my head I don’t remember exact folders it ignores, but it definitely does not index the full file system.
Spotlight going out of its mind indexing is my current annoyance. mds and mdworker processes taking up 100% of my CPU for hours on end, blasting hot air into my already hot home office. I have a screenshot of 30+ mdworker_shared processes simultaneously doing god knows what, roasting my CPU. Nothing I do seems to help, including limiting spotlight to specific folders, disabling it for certain volumes from the command line, there's just no way tell Spotlight to not melt my CPU without turning off the service altogether. Total madness and it's an opaque black box.
I don't bother with Exposé, I disabled its shortcuts and use AltTab [0] instead. 90% of the time I just want to swap between the last two recently used windows and that makes it incredibly easy.
Yeah even spotlight search sucks these days. When it first came out in Tiger or so it worked great. Now it's slow and it never finds what I'm looking for even if I type the exact name.
That's too bad. Spotlight was fantastic then. Its ability to search for applications, file names, tags you set on files and inside the content of files was so incredibly convenient.
Windows 7 also had a fantastic search mechanism in its Start Menu (although it came 4 years after Tiger's Spotlight) that has since been broken in Windows 8 and 10 for reasons unknown.
Not to deny your experience and I’m sure that it is giving you problems, but I never have problems finding things with spotlight and the finder search. The files almost always come right up. the only thing I don’t like is when it has displayed a result and then it adds a late addition in place of the item that I was just about to click on. I’d rather it wait to display results until it had the full set.
I do configure Finder to start its search in the current folder because that is usually where I want to start searching for a file and I want to limit the number of possible false positives. It’s easy to expand the search if needed.
I have heard of people who force Spotlight to reindex their drive if they are having trouble with getting results. Have you tried doing that?
I normally run spotlight from the looking glass icon in the menu bar so there is no 'current folder'. What happens is that it turns up a whole ton of XML files, dat file etc instead of the files I'm looking for. They appear only later and at the end.
In the beginning it had much more sense to keep that stuff out. And yeah I can exclude folders but I don't really want to have to micromanage that stuff. The whole point of Spotlight was not having to do that.
My first gripe is about how finder responds to the Option + left arrow and Option + right arrow keys when renaming files. It appears to have been designed by a drunken lobster. Hitting Option + left or right arrow while playing with a filename that contains text, numbers, periods and dashes is a fun exercise. The system treats periods, dashes and other characters as separators, but there's no telling whether hitting Option + arrow will land your cursor before or after the separator, or even skip the separator altogether and jump to the next word.
My second gripe is about how you can use the keyboard instead of the mouse to activate some but not all buttons in the OS. For example, Shift + Option + Backspace in finder lets you clear the trash. It pops up a window asking you to confirm, and you hit enter and off it goes. Now try renaming a bunch of files in finder. You can't even use TAB to navigate to the RENAME option to select it. Nooo... you must use the clicky thing.
98 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadIt's lists like these that remind me that I have sanded off a lot of the rough edges in MacOS to make it so comfortable, and those who are unwilling/unable or don't know how can be met with frustration from MacOS.
The same can be done about virtually any OS (including Windows) to make it suck less. But none of them are advertised as the most easy-to-use OS.
I used to do this once in a while, back in PowerPC days. Twenty years ago, it was amusing.
Contexts solves my #1 annoyance with macOS.
(I've never used Linux.) What's wrong with it? Just not what you're used to, or you're used to something better?
It's annoying, but it totally goes to shit when you start using multiple spaces/desktops. Now cmd-tab sometimes switches to applications that aren't even open on your desktop (or sometimes it switches to other desktops). Just a total disaster of an interface.
On top of this, fullscreened windows go to some ephemeral desktop/space, which confuses the heck out of new users. I cannot believe that the Mac interface is considered "clean" or "well thought out."
Q. What do you do on Linux instead of having to remember "whether you're switching to a different application (cmd-tab), or a different window of the same application (cmd-` ???)" ? I don't know the way you're used to doing it, so it's impossible for me to assess your claims.
> On top of this, fullscreened windows go to some ephemeral desktop/space
I'd never CMD-TABed a fullscreened window before - not sure why you would want to do that, and I very rarely use fullscreen - so I never came across that! Tried doing it now - yeah, I had no idea where my fullscreen CMD-TABed firefox went or how to get it back (although New Tab worked)... So I googled it: under System Preferences->Keyboard->Mission Control->Shortcuts there are 3 shortcuts for move space right, left and go to desktop 1, which I activated, so if that ever happens I will hopefully remember what to do. Thanks, I learnt something :-)
https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Spaces-on-Mac-OS-X
You can group windows from the same app too, if you've got lots of windows open.
Also, my long-time mac-using SO tells me she used to use spaces but found them counterproductive, so turned them off altogether, so maybe that's a good idea for people who run into problems with them when moving to macs.
Old reply, which assumed this was a keyboard shortcut app:
Does it consistently work across all apps? Because I've gone the way of manually configuring keyboard shortcuts, but it seems like I have to do it in several places, and some apps still misbehave (particularly navigating through text with CTRL, shift, pgup, pgdown, home, end)
https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-to-speed-up-mac-with-app...
I find that whenever I am not on MacOS, I am missing preview and there just isn't any substitute for it.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/digital/...
https://imgur.com/a/oHUM5J7
https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/interact-with-text-in...
Are you switching between English and some other Latin alphabet language? Or non-Latin?
(AFAIK there's no mass-discard option, but I've never really thought about it before because 99% of the time Preview is showing me something that's already on disk)
Yes, screenshot part of the screen, do a quick edit or highlight in Preview, and paste it to GitHub or email. I never want the screenshots to be saved to disk but end up with my Preview full of "dirty" screenshots.
There used to be command key shortcuts for the don't save/cancel/save (command-d/s/c iirc?) dialog buttons, but they've changed the ui to delete/save and seem to have removed the keyboard equivalents.
The right way to do it (in my opinion) would be option-click on the Delete button or command-option-D, but they don't seem to have implemented that.
Command-d is still mapped to don't save (at least in Preview, just verified). Escape is cancel.
Are you running macOS Monterey? It doesn't seem to have a Don't Save option in the "Do you want to keep this new document" dialog box - it's Delete, and command-d does not work for me.
1. Me: Clicks on .py file ... MacOS: "Please update XCode with 13GB of patches..."
2. Me: Tries to run "gdb" ... MacOS: "Please create a manual certificate to debug your C code..."
It takes forever, but it really shouldn't. It only seems to get installed to provide a compiler. Why does that take an hour?
`apt install gcc` takes a minute.
Yes, it's absurd that you need a third-party application to install Xcode.
Apple's Open Scripting Architecture is something like 30 years old at this point. Macs have been scriptable using JavaScript for more than 20 years (JavaScript OSA, 2001), and JXA has been included in macOS since 2013.
AppleScript may have been something of a failure, but HyperTalk (which it was based on) was a huge success.
Personally I like AppleScript, even if I mainly use Python (and occasionally JavaScript) for scripting macOS and iOS. Now I want to try Late Night Software's Script Debugger 8, which looks like a nice IDE for AppleScript.
I wish Apple had better developer documentation in general.
It seems to have taken a downturn recently even as they have accelerated feature velocity with things like SwiftUI.
also me: all OSes should just have ffmpeg preinstalled. so we don't relearn these encoding commands over and over again.
Have you seen what happens when Apple preinstalls a useful open source utility? You're lucky if you get one update per decade. Also, if Apple preinstalled ffmpeg, it's going to be limited to only codecs (and maybe containers?) that aren't going to get Apple sued, probably not even the ones they've licensed for system use, so I hope you like 90s codecs.
It's strictly better for Apple/etc to make it simpler to install MacPorts or fink or brew or whatever other package manager is cool today and let you install that and the packages you like, preferably without requiring xcode, because xcode is big.
Sometimes I want to carry my laptop around, and I want my windows in a particular way. When I plug in my screens again, I want them back again in the multiscreen setup.
This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. So eventually I end up having to move the windows to other screens, maximize, etc before I can get on with my work.
You'd think there was a way where it could remember what was plugged in and restore as appropriate.
1. Why can't windows remember their positions when using multiple screens? Is it a bug in the OS or a bug in the App (because some apps seem to work better than others?)
2. Why does Finder search suck so bad? I generally find it easier to drop to a command line and use 'find' rather than use Finder. Finder in general kinda sucks.
3. Why doesn't the Always Open With option on the Other... submenu seem to work?
4. Why does Exposé not work half the time? I have many applications with many windows open for each. I don't want to use Mission Control to select the window, I want to use Exposé. Half the time Exposé just gives me the desktop. Not what I want.
Parallels decided to install Windows Media Player as my media player for all music and video file types on macOS and I want to reset all of them to VLC.
You can.
Right Click -> Open With -> Other... (Always open with checkbox)
is for setting a particular association for the particular file you right-clicked (maybe you always want this file to open in Sublime, but this other one with the same extension in TextEdit, for some reason, etc).
command-I to open the Get Info pane -> expand Open With block -> use dropdown labelled "Use this application to open all documents like this one" -> click Change All... button
is the bulk edit flow
On Windows you can do things like set an application for all media files. Or choose which file types that VLC supports that it should open.
On macOS you have to modify every single file type by hand - which also requires a file of that type to operate on. It should be in System Preferences instead.
The files don't need to be valid, just have the extension you want to associate, so you can do something like `touch _.mp3 _.mp4 _.m4a _.mkv` then select those files and set them all at once.
https://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/
#3 I think that only applies to the current file, not its type. Use the info pop up for that.
#4 generally seems to be linked to certain apps creating windows in “unusual” ways. Quit apps till the culprit is found.
(In case it’s unclear: not defending the design choices, just suggesting.)
[0] https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
Windows 7 also had a fantastic search mechanism in its Start Menu (although it came 4 years after Tiger's Spotlight) that has since been broken in Windows 8 and 10 for reasons unknown.
I do configure Finder to start its search in the current folder because that is usually where I want to start searching for a file and I want to limit the number of possible false positives. It’s easy to expand the search if needed.
I have heard of people who force Spotlight to reindex their drive if they are having trouble with getting results. Have you tried doing that?
I normally run spotlight from the looking glass icon in the menu bar so there is no 'current folder'. What happens is that it turns up a whole ton of XML files, dat file etc instead of the files I'm looking for. They appear only later and at the end.
In the beginning it had much more sense to keep that stuff out. And yeah I can exclude folders but I don't really want to have to micromanage that stuff. The whole point of Spotlight was not having to do that.
It'll change your life when it comes to searching on your local machine. Mind you just for files. It does not index tags nor metadata.
My second gripe is about how you can use the keyboard instead of the mouse to activate some but not all buttons in the OS. For example, Shift + Option + Backspace in finder lets you clear the trash. It pops up a window asking you to confirm, and you hit enter and off it goes. Now try renaming a bunch of files in finder. You can't even use TAB to navigate to the RENAME option to select it. Nooo... you must use the clicky thing.