Cool Hidden Mac OS Tricks for the Everyday User

If you are a Mac lover and a diehard fan then it is time to dig in and learn some cool features and tricks about the operating systems. There are so many hidden tricks to learn about they you probably have no clue about. Some tricks help you customize your Mac experience visually and other tricks are just great nuggets to know about just in case you may need to use them. Ever since the conception of a Mac computer, it has had a reputation of having great customization options for the user to utilize.

Recent Items Stack

With the recent update to Mac OS, it has given us the ability to stack icons on the dashboard. What you may not know is that there is a way to create a “recent items” stack. In order to unlock this neat feature just copy and paste this line of code into the terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

Resizing Your Dock

Most Mac users know that you can resize your dock through the system settings. Well there is another, much easier, way to resize your dock that literally takes you seconds. Hold down where the separator is on your dock and then from there you can span up and down, which will increase or decrease the size of the dock.

Repair Permissions

Sometimes your Mac will become stubborn and will simply refuse to perform a task that may seem pretty basic and routine. Sometimes it may be something such as installing a new application, copying a file into a folder or even opening up a browser. When it seems like you have tried absolutely everything possible and you have had enough, try to open the Disk Utility and then repair disk permissions. The Disk Utility is located in the utilities folder and you may be surprised on how many things can be fixed with this small little fix.

Black Screen

Sometimes you may want to quickly black out your screen to either hide something you are doing on your Mac from a co-worker or maybe you just want to let the screen take a rest for a minute. If you hit ⌃⇧+eject it will immediately dim your screen so dark it will literally look as if it was blacked out. Go ahead and give it a try!

These few tips are not event the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the vast amount of tricks, hidden features and customization you can do to your Mac. To learn some great hotkeys check out our previous blog article on the topic.