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macOS

General

  • macOS Tips & Tricks • Saurabh 📖

    A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.

Dotfiles

Scripting

Empty trash from the command line

Settings

Keyboard Workflow

Mapping Caps Lock to Escape when tapped and Control when held

Window Management

  • Rectangle app
  • Amethyst app
  • yabai
    • deprecates chunkwm

Stopping macOS from blocking port 5000

  • If you find your port 5000 unexpectedly in use on macOS and lsof -i tcp:5000 tells you “ControlCenter” is the process that’s running, this may explain why.
  • If you have trouble disabling the “AirPlay Receiver” setting via the UI, this command worked for me:
/usr/bin/sudo -u <your-username> /usr/bin/defaults -currentHost write com.apple.controlcenter.plist AirplayRecieverEnabled -bool false

Quickly opening browser bookmarks with Alfred

  • Recently got a new Recursion laptop and one of the first things I missed was all the bookmarks I’d saved on my old one
  • Why:
    • We open lots of webpages every day
    • Searching through browser bookmarks is slow
    • Organizing bookmarks into folders is slow
    • Moving your mouse and clicking is slow
    • But searching our bookmarks with your keyboard is fast!
  • How:
    • Install Alfred by downloading it from the website or running brew install --cask alfred
    • If you want to use Alfred as a Spotlight replacement (you should!):
      • Open your macOS System Settings, go to Keybaord > Keyboard Shortcuts… > Spotlight, and uncheck “Show Spotlight search”
      • Open Alfred’s Preferences, go to General, check “Launch Alfred at login” and update the “Alfred Hotkey” to cmd-space
    • Open Alfred’s Preferences
      • Under Features > Web Bookmarks, select one or more sources of browser bookmarks (e.g. “Google Chrome Bookmarks”)
    • Wait a few minutes while Alfred indexes the bookmarks you just added
    • Open Alfred and start typing and watch your bookmarks appear!
    • Keep typing until the bookmark you need is the top result, then press enter to open it in the browser you selected (or, press the provided shortcut (cmd-[number]) as soon as you see your bookmark in the list)
  • Workflow improvements:
    • It takes no time to open a bookmark! Open Alfred, type a few characters, hit enter, and you’re there
    • It’s now hepful to save a lot of browser bookmarks! If you think a page may ever be useful to you again, don’t hesitate to bookmark it. Since you’ll be searching instead of scrolling, it doesn’t matter how long your list of bookmarks gets. When naming each new bookmark, include any the keywords you think you might use to search for it later
    • Don’t waste any more time organizing your bookmarks into folders. You’re done opening the Bookmarks menu and scrolling. You open bookmarks with Alfred now! 😎
    • Over time, Alfred will learn which result you want for each combination of search characters, so your most commonly visited bookmarks will soon only require one or two characters to appear as the top result
  • Hope that helps speed you up
  • (add screenshots of the preferences + searches/results)

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