For a mouse-first OS, there sure is a heavy dep on keyboard modifiers. Day to day it doesn't bother me so much, and I even like some of them, but so much functionality is hidden with no mouse-based option. Opt-Shift-V? :/
Windows does this much, much better. I can't think of a feature where you need to use the Windows key to modify the options presented in the GUI (though the Windows key has some unique shortcuts). I'm sure someone else will correct me.
Many of these features Windows has no analogue for. Consider:
> By default, clicking inside a scroll bar will scroll partially towards the clicked location. Hold Option while clicking in the scroll bar to jump directly to the clicked location.
There is no way to present this option in the GUI without cluttering up the scroll bar, so neither Windows nor macOS do so. But at least this feature is available for power users.
I admit that in places where there IS space in the UI (menu bar, right click), I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
> I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
Most likely to keep menus reasonably short and usable, which is particularly important on the smaller Macbooks and on iPads in Sidecar mode which can easily turn long menus into scrolling messes.
Also, progressive disclosure. This way allows the options to exist without overwhelming less technical users.
Does anyone have any advice for making the most of the Dock? I find it pretty unhelpful coming from an older Windows / Linux background: I just want easy access to the windows that are open on my current workspace on my current monitor, and it seems ill-suited to that. I usually have it on auto-hide because it takes up space without providing much value.
I'm aware that I can do the three finger swipe to look at all of my windows, but that takes over my full screen and the previews constantly move location, so I can't build any muscle memory for it.
Really, I'm just looking for a classic, unobtrusive task switcher that lets me quickly navigate through what's on my screen without having to muddle through anything else (i.e. the Windows taskbar with all collapsing turned off)
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions about using Cmd+Tab or Raycast or Exposé or such, but I'm really just looking for a taskbar equivalent that doesn't require me to use a hotkey or switch "visual contexts". I want something that's persistent and shows the visible applications and their windows, and lets me click on them to raise them. A big part of this for me is being able to see what I have open at a glance, especially due to macOS's historically poor window management.
Edit edit: This is on me for using the words "task switcher" - that brings to mind Alt-Tab when I really meant to refer to the taskbar.
The main thing for me was the windows previews, I used to have hyperdock but stopped showing the windows previews. Right now I am trying DockDoor, so far is ok but you need to speed up the fade animation or it has some annoying behavior (reopens preview if pointer gets hover).
IIRC Finder has an option to delete files from the Trash 30 days after they're put there. I just enable that option and forget about the Trash completely.
Good news: there's a command under the Finder menu (to the left of File) "Empty Trash..."
Bad news: there's no obvious easy way to view the contents of the Trash before emptying it, without clicking on it in the dock. It's not under "Go", you can't add it to the sidebar either with Settings or by dragging it, and various instructions to navigate to "~/.Trash" don't work in Sequoia.
Good news: But you can add it to the sidebar by opening the Trash and using File > Add to Sidebar. And it shows up with its nice custom trash icon.
The dock just annoys me. I’ve been a Mac user for almost 15 years and it has never seemed useful for me. I cmd+tab or use Alfred to switch apps. To switch between windows of one application it’s cmd+`.
Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
The command-tab switcher has a lot of hidden functionality:
I always only use cmd-tab to open the switcher, then I use arrow keys to pick an application, up/down arrows to view an application’s windows (arrow keys and enter to select a specific one)
You can also hit Q to quit an application from the switcher and probably more things I’m currently forgetting.
Wait... What? That application-window trick is awesome. How have I been using been using Macs for twenty+ years and never found that? Discoverability = not-awesome.
As repetitive as these top-tips threads can be, we need one every now and again. Someone's guaranteed to learn something from them, and I'm grateful it was my turn today.
I have mixed feelings about discoverability. I'd usually rather functionality be available in a non-discoverable fashion than unavailable because designers couldn't figure out how to surface it in the UI. And, one of the things I like about vim and emacs is the interface can be extremely minimal with all the functionality I need behind key shortcuts and the like. (Although, emacs has a nice solution of `C-x C-b` list all the available shortcuts for the current window and `M-x` listing all the available commands.
The way I learned these shortcuts was reading macOS's help back in 2007, but the quality of documentation bundled with macOS has gone downhill quite a bit.
Install Alfred or Raycast and Command+Space your way to everything. Its 100x faster. I can launch any app in about 3 key strokes, which takes < 2 seconds and often less than a second with muscle memory.
For example cmd+space+c will launch or switch to chrome. cmd+space+py is pycharm, cmd+space+go is goland, cmd+space+fi is finder, cmd+space+me is messages, cmd+space+1 is 1Password. cmd+space+1p+space will start searching 1Password.
That launches apps. You can also just start doing math problems (calculator) by just cmd+space and start typing out a math equation. cmd+space+ai+space and just start asking a question to AI.
These only scratch the surface. But cmd+space, which is an easy modifier combo that you can do anytime, will basically unlock unlimited power. Once you get the muscle memory down you can literally launch any app in less than a second without even looking. If the app is already open, it just brings that app to foreground. Once you have that, you can use alt+tab to switch between apps that are already open. This is useful if you are just swapping between two or three apps for reference quickly. Furthermore alt+tilde (the squiggle key above tab and below escape on most latin keyboards) will switch between open windows of the same type. FOr example if you have 2 chrome windows open, it will switch only between those windows.
I also take this same approach on my phone. I'm on Android atm so I can use Nova Launcher for a completely blank home screen and then set a swipe gesture to bring up the search panel. On iPhone you can achieve similar by enabling removing everything from the home screen and using the app libary or search although it does look weird with the empty dock section at the bottom so I tended to just leave stuff like the browser in there.
I feel like I achieve the same app opening speed with built-in Spotlight e.g. `cmd+space me` opens Messages for me too, without any third party software
I find it superior to the dock. The applications on the task bar are persistent and only those active on the current desktop are shown. It handles multiple monitors too.
It has a few quirks I haven’t sorted out yet, but the overall experience is much closer to Windows 11.
Pro Tip: I use it conjunction with the dock by putting the dock on the side and shrinking the dock down to its smallest size and increasing the magnification effect.
Not trying to be snarky: why do you hate paying a regular fee for regularly updated software? Wouldn't the alternative be upgrade pricing, which is essentially just subscription pricing with extra steps?
I mean, it does work pretty similar to the windows task bar? If an application is open, it is listed there in the dock with a mark under it. You can pin applications to the dock or remove them via right clicking it. Right clicking on one will provide a list the windows which are open to which you can select from, as well as a "show all windows" option which will hide everything else, and visually show just the windows for that application (you can also just force-click on the app icon to do this).
The only difference I see is that the windows taskbar provides a preview thumbnail when hovering over the icons. In which case, there's apps you can get for that.
The big difference for me is that there is no way to quickly jump between multiple windows of the same application. I often have multiple different projects open in vscode and would love a way to switch between them without having to right-click and selecting one from the list. All I want is something like the windows taskbar with auto-grouping disabled.
I get that. I use it on a pair of 27” 1440p monitors. It really supports my preferred method of multitasking, which is really rapid-switched single-tasking.
It will get out of the way on smaller screens, though. As soon as a window gets close to the previews, they get out of the way, unlike the dock.
I basically use it to see which programs are open. Also when you get into macOS window hell, it can be helpful to see at a glance if anything on the dock isn't open (programs opened which are not in the dock will appear on the other side of the | )
When the Open/Save dialog is open, hit Cmd+Shift+G to open a dialog where one can input the path as a string. Really useful when switching between terminal and GUI.
Writing in a text field in one window while referring to another window, where the window with the text field would overlap the other window if it were frontmost.
- Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > <cmd>), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workflows' to make frequent tasks extremely streamlined (I use one to open LLM prompts in five LLMs, so I press command + space 'llm <prompt>' and 5 browser tabs open with the same prompt in grok, claude, chatgpt, perplexity, and (local) deepseek.
- Itsycal: an 'install and forget' calendar for your menu bar (it also uses vim keybindings to move around the calendar which is a fun yet practical easter egg)
- There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I'm using yabai with SIP enabled. The only thing that is missing is sending a window to another workspace. To do that I launch Mission Control and simply drag the window to desired workspace. It turns out I don't do that often so I can live with that.
The workspaces feature in Aerospace is phenomenal and so much better than native macOS workspaces. I highly recommend it. Also the accordion layout of aerospace is better than Yabai’s stacks, and the way that resizing windows works is also better
I tried it, it's nice. There's an issue where high CPU usage makes it unusable though, last time I checked it was still open. Will probably try again in future.
I’ve never used yabai or i3. I think the docs/defaults/configurations just really sold me on aerospace. yabai never really caught my eye. I’ve never seriously used Linux
I also think Aerospace was positioned as “macOS native features only” which helped sell me on it. Aka no hacks or workarounds
I wanted to like it, but like all tiling window managers for macOS, it feels too tacked on and janky. For instance, Finder tabs simply aren't possible when using Aerospace.
I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.
Only one AI section out of 12 total sections, and while the second section has an AI example, it's only one out of five.
It's basically Alfred with more (?) functionality. Which is basically Spotlight with more functionality. Which is basically a tool to "do stuff" from anywhere on the device.
The product is good, but there’s a lot of telemetry that I was not comfortable with given that search bar like those may see very sensitive information.
I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.
I should do a lot more with Alfred, but apart from using it as a launcher my most used feature is the clipboard search. After invoking it by typing 'clip' into the box, I get an incremental search on all clipboard contents it has tracked, and can re-copy any of those items to the current clipboard by pressing enter. Very useful and efficient when it's part of your workflow.
Agreed. Spotlight search does quite well for me. I think there is a discoverability problem with native mac functionality. People tend to install lots of software that duplicates native features
> install lots of software that duplicates native features
I installed some software for key remapping and window tiling (karabiner and rectangle) when I couldn't figure out how to do it natively. You seem like you know what you're talking about; do you happen to have native recommendations?
I was using Karabiner for years just to remap caps to a hyper key. A few months ago replaced it with a launchagent to run something like this remapping caps to F19 (and using F19 instead of hyper, in hammerspoon) -- has been working great.
I have no problems with Spotlight search. I use Alfred for the plug-ins, it's extensibility, workflows, clipboard history, everything else it can do.
Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?
I'm on Sonoma (14.5). In System Settings > Siri & Spotlight,
1. I can deselect some pre-defined categories that Spotlight searches
2. I can click the "Spotlight Privacy..." button (at the very bottom right). Then I can add folders for it to ignore.
(My preference is for Spotlight to ignore almost everything, so that it isn't indexing stuff and eating CPU on this old Macbook Air. I only have it scan Applications, Calculator, and System Settings. I have it specifically ignore my entire home directory which is where all my git repos are.)
Are you saying that if I limit the Spotlight search space then Alfred will follow? Makes sense, if it's relying on Spotlight's index. I'll give it a try.
Spotlight search seems to have gotten better, while Alfred search has had me rebuild my index more than just a few times and it doesn't cope well with nested directories.
Something happened in 15.1 onwards for me where Spotlight has become way faster and way better. But yes, Alfred used to dominate in search and speed as well.
> - There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?
I only tried the intersection of 'free' and 'trusted' (the latter being subjective, based on a glance at website/repo). I hadn't yet tried Magnet, but I see it's $5 so I'll splash out over the weekend and give it a try. Thanks for the rec! Any newb tips appreciated.
+1 for magnet. Indispensable to the extent that on rare occasions I use others Macs where it’s not installed I’ll gift it to them (and they invariably become passionate about it).
I've been using SizeUp for 15 years too, but I just switched to Rectangle a few months ago. Mostly because it's faster. You wouldn't think it matters, but for some reason it does.
> There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.
I agree, aerospace is great! I'm surprised I don't hear of it more often. I'm recent convert to MacOS and was surprised at how bad the window management was by default, but aerospace fixed that right up.
Used Divvy for years, but switched to Moom last year and I’m very happy with it. One feature I particularly like is being able to set up “chains” of window positions to a single shortcut, so you can trigger it multiple times and it will cycle through different positions. I do miss the little grid layout window a bit, but Moom works a lot better for me overall.
I've been using the Amethyst window manager for ~10 years. It's open-source and generally works well, though it occasionally requires a restart (the app, not the OS)
I lived with Alfred for many-many years, but Raycast seems much better this days. Simpler yet richer and constantly developed, many plugins, it's simple to do your own and... it has window manager
Is Raycast open source at all? With nearly $50M of funding (most recently $30M series B last fall) I have to wonder about the long term sustainability and whether I want to invest my time and workflows into the whims of a VC backed “free forever” plan.
Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.
This is a concern of mine as well. Alfred is also just so ridiculously lightweight and efficient compared to, well, everything these days. At 18MB on disk and sitting at 0% CPU and 42MB RAM on my machine right now with no spread of support processes, it feels almost like an endangered species Tiger-era Mac app that’s managed to survive to the current day.
As much as I'd like to imagine investors are shoveling money into a pit because they want us to have nice software, the sheer amount of money feels like the only two options are (A) to reach profitability we're raising prices way up to juice the people who have become dependent on Raycast when it was affordable, or (B) blah blah incredible journey, our team is being acquihired for a sort of related project and Raycast will slowly wither and die as we realign priorities with the people who pay us.
I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.
It’s positively comedic that Bluesky, an entire large social network has taken less funding ($36M according to [1]) compared to Raycast (… an application launcher).
Development has been slow lately, but Quicksilver[0] is still around as a FOSS alternative. We have an upcoming release that should refresh things a bit for Seqouia.
Launchbar[0] is also still around - not actively developed, but actively maintained. Happy user since 10 years already, even though I own a lifetime Alfred license.
I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this
AeroSpace is really nice, when it works. As soon as I use more of CPU, for example to compile something, it gets unusably slow, as in 5 seconds to do anything slow. The worst part is that the workspaces are virtual, so when you kill it, you're left with a tens of pixel-sized windows in Mission Control.
So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.
I find rectangle to be pretty good after needing a replacement for sizeup when development stopped there. My solution is to just ignore the existence of the full screen windows in favor of using the max window size shortcut to fill the current display. Then I can send a window to another display or resize it with shortcuts that are easy enough to get used to and avoid all the transitions that take seconds. The whole full screen experience is so bad otherwise, and this is from someone that is very used to the trackpad and all their gestures.
One thing that’s been annoying me about desktop/window management is that whenever I’ve organized my windows that I need for one project on one desktop, I eventually need to upgrade vscode or warp or macOS needs to be updated. And then restarting an app it forgets on which desktop each window was running… I typically have 3-5 projects open that I switch between (and trying to organize them on different desktops has been sort of futile.)
Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?
I just made my own window manager with Hammerspoon. First I copied whatever rectangle/magnet was doing and then added my own logic on top of it to fit the style I work with windows.
As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.
And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.
Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.
I have found simple hammerspoon scripts to be a great alternative to a windows manager. You can map keys to some parts of the screen. It also supports multi-display systems.
I used to use tiling window managers on Linux, but I found out that my Mac usage contains lots of “graphical” apps that don't like to live in a quarter of the screen or something like that.
So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.
I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).
I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.
I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.
Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.
Why not just have all your windows fullscreen and three finger swipe between them like macOS was designed to be used. If you dont like the extremely opinionated macOS window design why not just use Linux?
> Hold the Option key while expanding an outline view to recursively expand all children.
I use this pretty frequently and it’s always a drag to find when an app doesn’t implement it. It feels so silly to be forced to manually open/close numerous items when most other apps I use can expand/collapse them all in one go.
I am a cheapskate and use Quicksilver. Command spacebar, app pops up.
I hate the Finder. I used to use an app called cols that resized finder windows to an appropriate size. Stuck it in the finder toolbar. I looked for the applescript but can't find it. How tough is it to fill the finder window with all the columns so that the Magic Mouse doesn't wag the columns back and forth? Just fill the window. Cols, anyone?
Does anyone know of a good solution to manage menubar on Mac? Have M2 Pro with a notch which hides many of many items and it's so difficult to access them unless I quit a few of them.
You also need Fn on laptops. I just tried it. And it seems to start with focusing the apple menu without opening it, and the focus marker is hard to notice, at least in natural light where I am now.
There are so many hidden/obscure keyboard shortcuts in macOS, from time to time a post with a nice collection (and usually some hidden gems) appears on the front page here.
But I always wondered if there is a place where you can find all of them, for reference.
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Kinda like command palette for every app, I like it. Would be even better if it preselected the matching option.
Unfortunately, this is broken in Firefox – they’ve bound ⌘ ? to their help page, and it opens then immediately closes the Help menu. You can rebind it to something else (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ /) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → Firefox, menu title: Get Help.
One other problem is, it doesn’t always find the command I’m looking for. E.g. when I typed “dev”, it didn’t show “Web Developer Tools” at first. I then checked Tools menu (it was there), then tried typing it in the Help menu again, and sure enough, it found it this time.
I've never gotten this to work on an ISO-keyboard (chunky enter key).
It opens "Help" in every single app, even Apple's like Finder or Safari.
I've tried GB, German, US-International, and my default EurKey layout. None of them work. This shortcut always felt like an Alt+F4 prank to me.
no, when hitting Command-? the help menu bar opens a search box that takes you directly to matching menu items -- like Spotlight for menu items. you can activate them directly from the search box. no learning involved
- I love Shortcat (https://shortcat.app/). It lets you do almost anything on your screen without having to leave your keyboard.
- Also, Houdahspot (https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/) for advanced searching and file-filtering (you can even exclude results from certain folders). It has search templates, saved searches (which appear as files in Finder), and the ability to export the current search as a Smart Folder (amazing!).
I just wish that Smart Folders worked on iOS and Dropbox …
Here’s my tip: Messages stuck with a badge but you have no idea what’s unread / how to clear it? Ask Siri for your unread messages. It’ll go through them and remove the badge.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadWindows does this much, much better. I can't think of a feature where you need to use the Windows key to modify the options presented in the GUI (though the Windows key has some unique shortcuts). I'm sure someone else will correct me.
Apple has a concise list of keyboard shortcuts/modifiers listed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650
> By default, clicking inside a scroll bar will scroll partially towards the clicked location. Hold Option while clicking in the scroll bar to jump directly to the clicked location.
There is no way to present this option in the GUI without cluttering up the scroll bar, so neither Windows nor macOS do so. But at least this feature is available for power users.
I admit that in places where there IS space in the UI (menu bar, right click), I find it odd that the option-variants are not listed unless option is actively being held.
Most likely to keep menus reasonably short and usable, which is particularly important on the smaller Macbooks and on iPads in Sidecar mode which can easily turn long menus into scrolling messes.
Also, progressive disclosure. This way allows the options to exist without overwhelming less technical users.
Holding Shift and clicking scrollbar does jump directly to the clicked location on Windows.
If you need a pixel ruler, ⇧⌘4 and hit Escape to discard the screenshot
I'm aware that I can do the three finger swipe to look at all of my windows, but that takes over my full screen and the previews constantly move location, so I can't build any muscle memory for it.
Really, I'm just looking for a classic, unobtrusive task switcher that lets me quickly navigate through what's on my screen without having to muddle through anything else (i.e. the Windows taskbar with all collapsing turned off)
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions about using Cmd+Tab or Raycast or Exposé or such, but I'm really just looking for a taskbar equivalent that doesn't require me to use a hotkey or switch "visual contexts". I want something that's persistent and shows the visible applications and their windows, and lets me click on them to raise them. A big part of this for me is being able to see what I have open at a glance, especially due to macOS's historically poor window management.
Edit edit: This is on me for using the words "task switcher" - that brings to mind Alt-Tab when I really meant to refer to the taskbar.
https://github.com/ejbills/DockDoor/
See if that suits your needs
Command-Tab to switch apps, Command-Space to open apps.
Why would I want the Dock?
How do you empty the trash? It's never even occurred to me... how do you get to the trash except via the dock?
GUI: select item(s) and Option-Command-Delete
Command-line: rm -rf folder-or-file-path (or srm to securely remove)
Good news: there's a command under the Finder menu (to the left of File) "Empty Trash..."
Bad news: there's no obvious easy way to view the contents of the Trash before emptying it, without clicking on it in the dock. It's not under "Go", you can't add it to the sidebar either with Settings or by dragging it, and various instructions to navigate to "~/.Trash" don't work in Sequoia.
Good news: But you can add it to the sidebar by opening the Trash and using File > Add to Sidebar. And it shows up with its nice custom trash icon.
Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
You also do things like (for example) start a drag, ⌘+tab to show running apps, then drop on an app icon without using the dock.
I always only use cmd-tab to open the switcher, then I use arrow keys to pick an application, up/down arrows to view an application’s windows (arrow keys and enter to select a specific one)
You can also hit Q to quit an application from the switcher and probably more things I’m currently forgetting.
As repetitive as these top-tips threads can be, we need one every now and again. Someone's guaranteed to learn something from them, and I'm grateful it was my turn today.
The way I learned these shortcuts was reading macOS's help back in 2007, but the quality of documentation bundled with macOS has gone downhill quite a bit.
To swap between applications, use Cmd-Tab.
To swap between open windows of the current application you can use Cmd-Backtick.
Cmd-Tab, up arrow, arrow keys to the window you want, enter
Install Alfred or Raycast and Command+Space your way to everything. Its 100x faster. I can launch any app in about 3 key strokes, which takes < 2 seconds and often less than a second with muscle memory.
For example cmd+space+c will launch or switch to chrome. cmd+space+py is pycharm, cmd+space+go is goland, cmd+space+fi is finder, cmd+space+me is messages, cmd+space+1 is 1Password. cmd+space+1p+space will start searching 1Password.
That launches apps. You can also just start doing math problems (calculator) by just cmd+space and start typing out a math equation. cmd+space+ai+space and just start asking a question to AI.
These only scratch the surface. But cmd+space, which is an easy modifier combo that you can do anytime, will basically unlock unlimited power. Once you get the muscle memory down you can literally launch any app in less than a second without even looking. If the app is already open, it just brings that app to foreground. Once you have that, you can use alt+tab to switch between apps that are already open. This is useful if you are just swapping between two or three apps for reference quickly. Furthermore alt+tilde (the squiggle key above tab and below escape on most latin keyboards) will switch between open windows of the same type. FOr example if you have 2 chrome windows open, it will switch only between those windows.
FYI shift+cmd+space is also 1Password's quick access shortcut
Fast enough for me.
I started using an app called Sidebar:
https://sidebarapp.net/
I find it superior to the dock. The applications on the task bar are persistent and only those active on the current desktop are shown. It handles multiple monitors too.
It has a few quirks I haven’t sorted out yet, but the overall experience is much closer to Windows 11.
Pro Tip: I use it conjunction with the dock by putting the dock on the side and shrinking the dock down to its smallest size and increasing the magnification effect.
The only difference I see is that the windows taskbar provides a preview thumbnail when hovering over the icons. In which case, there's apps you can get for that.
Except that there is, and with multiple ways to do so:
1) CMD+Backtick
2) ALT+Tab + down/up arrow
3) force clicking the app icon
4) Clicking on "Show all windows"
5) Exposé
As far as I can tell, the only thing that's different between the windows task bar and the mac dock is the preview thumbnails.
It will get out of the way on smaller screens, though. As soon as a window gets close to the previews, they get out of the way, unlike the dock.
https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/
There's a detailed FAQ.
As others have said, CMD+Space is sufficient, just hide the dock.
Press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
https://paretosecurity.com/mac
TIL. Amazing little hack.
Cmd-click a window that is not currently focused; it'll register the click without making that window take the foreground
My tips:
- Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > <cmd>), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workflows' to make frequent tasks extremely streamlined (I use one to open LLM prompts in five LLMs, so I press command + space 'llm <prompt>' and 5 browser tabs open with the same prompt in grok, claude, chatgpt, perplexity, and (local) deepseek.
- Itsycal: an 'install and forget' calendar for your menu bar (it also uses vim keybindings to move around the calendar which is a fun yet practical easter egg)
- There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
- Vivid for double the screen brightness
https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/MiroWindowsManager.html
https://folivora.ai/
It’s very much changed how I work/use my computer. More than Rectangle did, more than LLMs have.
(I still adore hookshot/rectangle though :)
I also think Aerospace was positioned as “macOS native features only” which helped sell me on it. Aka no hacks or workarounds
I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.
https://www.raycast.com/
It's basically Alfred with more (?) functionality. Which is basically Spotlight with more functionality. Which is basically a tool to "do stuff" from anywhere on the device.
I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.
https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
I installed some software for key remapping and window tiling (karabiner and rectangle) when I couldn't figure out how to do it natively. You seem like you know what you're talking about; do you happen to have native recommendations?
For window tiling, can't say I've ever looked into it.
Spotlight search would bring up a wikipedia entry for app store instead of the app store on my laptop: https://imgur.com/QV1w7Kq
Typing 'finder' and hitting enter (e.g. to browse for a file), would open finder settings, rather than finder itself.
I haven't used it in ~1 year, those are a couple of examples I can recall.
Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?
1. I can deselect some pre-defined categories that Spotlight searches
2. I can click the "Spotlight Privacy..." button (at the very bottom right). Then I can add folders for it to ignore.
(My preference is for Spotlight to ignore almost everything, so that it isn't indexing stuff and eating CPU on this old Macbook Air. I only have it scan Applications, Calculator, and System Settings. I have it specifically ignore my entire home directory which is where all my git repos are.)
Something happened in 15.1 onwards for me where Spotlight has become way faster and way better. But yes, Alfred used to dominate in search and speed as well.
I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?
I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.
Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.
I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bluesky-514d#financi...
[0]: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver
[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this
[0] https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/68
So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.
Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?
As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.
And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.
Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.
So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.
I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).
I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.
I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.
Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.
https://github.com/niklasr22/BrightIntosh
I use this pretty frequently and it’s always a drag to find when an app doesn’t implement it. It feels so silly to be forced to manually open/close numerous items when most other apps I use can expand/collapse them all in one go.
I hate the Finder. I used to use an app called cols that resized finder windows to an appropriate size. Stuck it in the finder toolbar. I looked for the applescript but can't find it. How tough is it to fill the finder window with all the columns so that the Magic Mouse doesn't wag the columns back and forth? Just fill the window. Cols, anyone?
This was my favorite, but no longer works on Sequoia or whenever was the version that changed modal dialogs.
https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
To quickly find text, select some text and press ⌘E followed by ⌘G.
In save dialogs, press ⌘= to switch between the compact and expanded layout.
In save dialogs, press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
Hold Option while opening the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth menus to access extra options.
After copying a file, press ⌥⌘V to move the file instead of pasting a copy of it.
Terminal:
Press ⇧⌘A to select the output from the previous command.
Press ⌘L to clear the output from the previous command.
Press ⌃⌘V to paste and format text that is properly escaped for the shell.
Press ⌃T while a command is executing to view runtime statistics about the execution so far.
This one is very cool
This is really nice. Once I am in this 'search' mode, I couldn't figure out how to get out of this mode.
- Edited to make question more descriptive.
Shift command slash, got it.
> Press ⌃F2 to move keyboard focus to the application's menu bar. Start typing the first few letters of a menu title to jump to that menu.
Control F2? Control shift F2? None of those work on macOS Sequoiua.
But I always wondered if there is a place where you can find all of them, for reference.
Kinda like command palette for every app, I like it. Would be even better if it preselected the matching option.
Unfortunately, this is broken in Firefox – they’ve bound ⌘ ? to their help page, and it opens then immediately closes the Help menu. You can rebind it to something else (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ /) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → Firefox, menu title: Get Help.
One other problem is, it doesn’t always find the command I’m looking for. E.g. when I typed “dev”, it didn’t show “Web Developer Tools” at first. I then checked Tools menu (it was there), then tried typing it in the Help menu again, and sure enough, it found it this time.
1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1935257
https://shortcat.app
- Also, Houdahspot (https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/) for advanced searching and file-filtering (you can even exclude results from certain folders). It has search templates, saved searches (which appear as files in Finder), and the ability to export the current search as a Smart Folder (amazing!).
I just wish that Smart Folders worked on iOS and Dropbox …
You can also double right-click the video itself and enter Picture-in-Picture mode from that menu