Basic Mac Tips and Tricks

There are a number of useful tips and tricks for Mac; it becomes more and more difficult to answer which among these is the single most important Mac Tip. Here is a collection of Basic Mac tips and tricks every Mac user should know.

Locks screen instantly:

Before locking your screen, you should first enable the password lock feature. For enabling this feature, you should access the system preferences option and click security. Under security, you’ll find a tab named ‘general’. Enable the required password command after setting the time interval. Once you have enabled this feature, you can safely lock your Mac screen instantly using the key combination of Control+Shift+Eject. Your Mac screen gets locked immediately and a screen saver appears. To be able to get out of the screen saver all you need to do is enter your password.

Take a Screen Shot and store in Clipboard:

To be able to take the screen shot of the entire screen, all you need to do is enter the keyboard combination of Command+Control+Shift+3. This will take the screen shot of the screen you are accessing currently and save the same on the clipboard.

Quit the current active Application:

At times, when you need to quit the current active application without going through the confirmation process, you just need to hold down, for a couple of seconds, the key combinations of Control+Command+Shift+Escape. This command will forcefully close the current application without using the force quit menu, the activity monitor or the confirmation dialog.

Show all the hidden files:

Everyone has, at one point in time, wanted to see all hidden files from save dialog or from Open windows. To make this process easier, you can simply move between hidden files by clicking the Command+Shift+Period button simultaneously.  You don’t even have to type the complete path as the automatic tab completion works well. This is one of the most useful keyboard shortcuts in the Finder.

Access the Go To Folder:

To be able to access the Go To Folder, you have to hit the Command+Shift+G button which will help you navigate deeper in to the file system of OS X.

Free Unused memory:

Although Mac comes with a good memory management system, at times, this memory gets locked up in inactive state. To be able to make use of this’ locked up’ memory and to free unused memory, you have to enter the purge command. For this you need to access ‘utilities’ in the applications folder. Once you have accessed the same you should launch terminal and enter the purge command. Your OS X would probably take a couple of minutes to process the command. To check if this command has actually worked, you can open the activity monitor and check the free, inactive, and used memory status in the system memory folder.

Enter Focus Mode:

Most of the times we have a million windows open at the same time cluttering our space and making everything work at super slow speeds. To be able to focus on the app running in the foreground all you need to do is press the Option+Command+H button that will close all the background apps and keep the foreground app open for you.

These were some of the most useful Mac tips and tricks. There are a number of ways in which you can make the most out of your Mac.