Basic Tips for New Mac Users

Posted by Andy Atkinson on October 5, 2005 | Post type: Gain

Making the transition from PC to Mac has not been very difficult for me, but this is likely due to some familiarity with OS 8/9 in the 1990s, and some experience with Unix. Nevertheless, some advanced functionality of Windows that I have come to use on a daily basis, I expected to be able to "port over" to OS X immediately, and was not able to. On top of that, my first exposure to OS X is on a notebook, where the complexity of keyboard commands increases due to multi-functional keys. I've highlighted below some basic things that I think have been very useful for someone getting accustomed to their new Mac. Please add any additional tips or tricks in the comments.

OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

Navigate to the "Keyboard and Mouse" System Preference to view or modify default OS X keyboard shortcuts, or create your own.

Screenshots and keyboard shortcuts

One thing I wanted to be able to do right away was take a screenshot of the selected, or "active" window I am working with. To do this in Windows you type "Ctrl-Alt-PrintScrn" which copies your exact window, rounded corners and all, to the clipboard. The options are different in OS X. Saving your entire screen area with "Command-Shift-3" is easy, saving a cropped selection with "Command-Shift-4" is okay, but neither is as fast as copying just the selected window, which is great in Windows for making screenshot guides. Update: Copying selected windows possible by using a small program called Grab. You can launch this program by typing "grab" in Spotlight. It gives you some additional screenshot options, such as taking screenshots of just one window (what I want to do) with rounded corners and all. To do this, try typing "Shift-Command-W" to make a perfect screenshot of the window you select.

To find the rest of the keyboard shortcuts, open up "Keyboard & Mouse" in the System Preferences. From there you can view the default shortcuts, or create your own. An important shortcut for Mac notebook users coming from a Windows environment is the ability to "delete" (i.e. delete the text from the right to the left). Type "fn+delete" to do a "Windows-style" delete.

Expose was a feature added in the OS X 10.3 "Panther" release. It does some neat tricks, but the only thing I see that is actually useful is the view that shows you all of your active windows by spreading them out on your screen. This is very useful when you are working with a small 12" screen on an iBook or Powerbook. The keyboard shortcuts below are setup by default to control Expose:

  • F9 This one is useful, it spreads out all active windows for at-a-glance viewing, and scaled Quicktime movies very nicely
  • F10 This one dims the background while spreading out all windows of your current application (similar to F9, except that it will hide windows that are open for different applications)
  • F11 This one sends all but a sliver of your active windows to the screens edge, revealing your desktop (Similar to show desktop in Windows or "Windows+M")

Shrink the dock, turn on magnification

The dock takes up a lot of space when you have a 12" screen at XGA resolution. To reduce its size, move your pointer over the vertical separator, and click-and-drag to adjust its size. You can also adjust the size and other options in the dock System Preferences. I think the ideal setup for a small screen is to make the dock very small, then turn on "Magnification" in the System Preferences to expand the size of the icons. I am very impressed with how well all the icons scale in OS X.

OS X Terminal transparency

From the Terminal settings, you can adjust background colors, add one of your own photos, and control the transparency of the window.

Terminal transparency

The terminal lets you adjust one of the cool features of Mac OS X: window transparency. This lets you make terminal windows transparent enough so that you can see windows behind your Terminal window. One way I've used this is having a UNIX commands reference open in a browser, and executing the commands with a Terminal window on top of the browser. There are a number of preset color schemes as well, including green text on a black background-this looks very cool. To adjust these settings, open up the Terminal. Under the Terminal window, choose "Window Settings." From the drop-down menu, choose "Color." Try one of the "Standard Color Selections," or try adding your own background image.

Move application packages and remove files from desktop

One thing I didn't understand at first was that when I downloaded an application (like Firefox), it mounted the package on the desktop like it would for a removable drive. If I moved this to the trash, the application was gone. Basically I was expecting there to be a Mac binary that I would click to extract and install. My friend showed me that I could move the package to the Applications folder, then delete the mounted .DMG from the desktop.

Window maximizing and minimizing

Minimizing a window to the active applications area of the dock is easy with "Command-M", but what about maximizing? In Windows you hit "Windows-Shift-M" to "maximize" all "minimized" windows, but the equivalent combo doesn't exist in OS X (or I haven't found it). So far I haven't been able to maximize a window, or "alt-tab" (which is actually "Command-Tab") over to a minimized window (a window that is in the dock). For this reason, it looks like the dock is not all that useful. One hackish way of maximizing a window that is docked is to hit "Command-Q" as if you were going to close the application. This will prompt you with "Are you sure?" and you can hit cancel. You may wonder why this is important to me. The reason this is important is navigating any OS on a laptop with keyboard shortcuts is much more efficient, and saves the pain and frustration from using the built-in pointing device.

Scrolling

One very innovative feature is the two-finger scrolling, which is not enabled by default but can be turned on through the Keyboard and Mouse "System Preferences." You simply use two fingers next to each other and move them down at the same rate, and you're scrolling! The problems I have is that despite having checked "Allow Horizontal Scrolling," this never seems to work. I also have noticed that the touchpad is too sensitive and often sends me "Back" in a web browser when I am trying to scroll. If I can get the sensitivity feature adjusted, this will be very handy. I think that implementing a OS-wide scroll like this is a much better solution than "mouse gestures" that are tied to one application (like the Opera web browser).

Resources

About the author(s)

Andy started Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors, thousands of daily page views. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008.

Comments

# Micah Fitch at 2/13/2006 9:20 am cst
I'm assuming you are using firefox... horizontal scrolling does the same thing as scroll-wheel scrolling with the shift modifier on. In firefox, this makes the pages go back and forward. Use Camino! (or Shiira)

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# Anonymous at 2/13/2006 11:34 am cst
To make a screenshot of a window: Cmd-Shift-4, _then_ Space, then click on the desired window.

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# Andy Atkinson at 2/13/2006 1:13 pm cst
I have been meaning to give Camino a try. I have a lot of Firefox extensions, although I am becoming increasing disappointed with its sluggish performance on OS X, combined with the fact that the "Ctrl-Tab" keyboard shortcut for switching tabs broke in FF 1.5 I should have clarified that 2-finger scrolling is a feature of newer Apple machines (like the 1.33Ghz iBook), as the 1.33Ghz PB a friend of mine has does not have this feature. Looks like Apple made an upgrade to their touchpad. Thanks for the Camino suggestion!

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# Anonymous at 2/13/2006 3:21 pm cst
Go to about:config (type in the address bar) in Firefox and change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0.

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# mommedia at 3/2/2006 3:05 pm cst
I have one of the older models as well. There's a neat little program called iScroll2 which brings the 2-finger scrolling to our iBooks as well. I installed it and have been using it ever since. You can give it a try here: [http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/iscroll2/](http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/iscroll2/ "iScroll2") This guy also tells a bit about the firefox scrolling behavior, for anyone who might be interested in fine-tuning this a bit.

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# Daniel at 3/9/2006 11:19 am cst
I know this is kinda old now, so I don't know how much more you've learned... but being a new Mac user myself (I have a MacBook Pro), I've thoroughly researched various things that have helped me adjust. Maybe I'm misreading it, but it sounds like you don't fully grasp the concept between restoring a window and max/minimizing it. Restoring it is whehn, in Windows, you click on the taskbar tab and it comes to the front. Maximizing it is when you make it fill the whole screen. Filling the whole screen is not generally an option in OSX because it wastes space. Anyway, as for being able to minimize a window and access it from the keyboard- instead of minimizing it so the genie effect sucks it into the right side of the dock, hide the application instead (command+h). It doesn't put it into a new dock entry, and in this instance, when you command+tab to the application, it brings it back to the front. You seem like you want to use the keyboard a lot, and I think this will be of great use to you if you don't know about it.

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# Andy Atkinson at 3/9/2006 1:10 pm cst
At the time that article was written, I wasn't aware of hiding windows with "Command+H" as I am now. There certainly *is* a difference between hiding a window and minimizing it. I still think there should be (and probably is) a keyboard command to "extract" windows that are "minimized" to the dock. I found one mentioned on a blog, but could not get it to work on my iBook due to problems with the “alt” and “fn” key modifiers. Regarding "maximize," I was talking about a "windows-style" maximize, where the current active window is increased to the maximum size to fill the screen. I do *not* think this is a waste of space on a small screen, like the 12" screen on my iBook, although to the best of knowledge, OS X does not support any concept of "universal maximize" like Windows does. The trick of course, is getting used to Expose, which is great, and allows me to accomplish everything I can in Windows and more. I still find OS X to be cumbersome however, when there are some files on my desktop that I want to drag into my active window (like dragging files into an FTP client). My options are to used Expose, or hide it, both don’t work very well on a 12” screen at XGA resolution. In Windows I would minimize all windows, then maximize *only* the active window I want, this is clunky to do in OS X, since the only way I can think to accomplish it is to hide or send every window to the dock, the unhide or pull out only the window I want. Everything would change on a larger screen with a full keyboard of course, kind of like those larger screens and keyboards on the Intel iMacs. Hmmm...

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# Anonymous at 3/20/2006 11:16 am cst
> I still think there should be (and probably is) a keyboard command to “extract” windows that are “minimized” to the dock. I found one mentioned on a blog, but could not get it to work on my iBook due to problems with the “alt” and “fn” key modifiers. Do you remember what command that was?

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# Onyx at 1/3/2007 1:13 pm cst
On Daniel's Comment, hide the application instead (command+h). It doesn’t put it into a new dock entry, and in this instance, when you command+tab to the application This is great but I do not want to do this every time for an application to alt-tab it and bring it to the front after it has been minimized to the dock. Is there a program, widget, script that mimics the windows alt-tab window restore from minimized? This frustrates me coming from windows. ;-D Also, Can I enable the dock to drag folders to it? Is there a program/widget that allows this? Cheers

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# Karl at 1/3/2007 8:00 pm cst
Control-F3 will give you access to the dock, from there, arrow key to the minimized app window or hidden app. For all the standard keyboard shortcuts: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75459

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# Karl at 1/5/2007 3:21 pm cst
Andy, Regarding your FTP problem to hide all programs then maximize just the one you want... I'm assuming you tried control-command-H from your FTP program? That hides all programs except the active one. That is in the Application menu, so it can be so completely obvious, you look past it. Also, a great FTP program to get around what you describe is Panic's Transmit. It's shareware, and very very slick. http://www.panic.com/transmit/

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# Anonymous at 1/8/2007 2:00 am cst
one thing I didn't find for a long time was to ba able to swich between different windows of the same programm... it's "command (apple) - <"... now I use it every day ;-) another thing I just discovered recently: ^ in shortcut descriptions means "ctrl" and ALT does excately what it sais: it excecutes an alternativ control to the one already there... this is treated much more consistent than in windows... just my two pennies... peace s

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# MikeyLikesIt at 9/14/2007 4:54 pm cst

Thanks for putting this info online. I just got a new MacBook this week, and am switching over from Windows XP, mostly because I build websites and wanted a Unix based OS to do development on.

One of the most useful things I found solves the problem with Alt+Tabbing (on Windows) or Command+Tabbing (on Mac). Once completed, you'll be able to restore minimized windows from the dock, just like you can on Windows. Somebody created a nice video on YouTube that covers the method:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWa3iuZnHJs

Here are some links to the resources mentioned in the video (You will need to install 3 separate components): Application Enhancer: http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/ape/ PullTab: http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/pulltab/ Witch: http://www.manytricks.com/witch/

I didn't try this myself, but you may be able to get away with only installing Witch if you are willing to assign the Keystrokes to another combination, such as Option+Tab and Shift+Option+Tab. Might save you some work and you would then still have the standard Mac Application switcher on Command+Tab.

Witch is highly configurable, so you can set the options however you like after playing around with it.

Cancel Window Switch - Workaround/Solution: One thing that I found annoying at first was that after starting a window switch (W..itch), I was used to using the escape key to cancel if I decided I wanted to stay where I was, but on the Mac I have this launches the ultra cool media browser that you normally control with your remote. This is probably only on some Macs, but I don't know. To solve this I changed a couple settings in Witch: System Prefs > Witch > Behavior > Window List > select "Show Cancel ..." option System Prefs > Witch > Behavior > Window List > deselect "Start with 2nd ..." option

Anyway, hope that helps everyone. I loved it myself and it's made my transition to Mac much more comfortable.

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# MikeyLikesIt at 9/14/2007 5:10 pm cst

I too love the two finger scrolling, and the two finger click that pulls up the context menu. Be sure to enable these in your sys prefs. I saw this on the iPhone in a demo, but didn't know they had introduced the same thing into their touchpads already. Very Innovative and actually faster than an alternate mouse click.

I think the reason you are getting sent back in the browser is probably because you are holding down Option while swiping your fingers left/right, which is a shortcut for back/forward navigation.

I also like the Ctrl+Up/Down Swipe, which lets you zoom in and out of your screen. Great for presentations.

Delicious Spotlight Integration: If you use delicious for bookmarks, like me, then I have to highly recommend you install the Spotlight Delicious plugin, which indexes your delicious bookmarks and provides me with by far the best way to seach my bookmarks that I've ever found (ultra fast and multiple keyword searching). http://ianhenderson.org/delimport.html

Enjoy

I can't believe this ... I've only been using Mac for 4 days and I'm already very happy with the conversion on many levels.

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# MikeyLikesIt at 9/14/2007 9:17 pm cst

I just found an article that discusses APE, which I mentioned above as being required to install PullTab, which lets you replace the Command+Tab function on OS X.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/03/14/unsanity-updates-utilities-application-enhancer-unsupported-by-apple

The article basically talks about the fact that Unsanity makes products that users love for the interface benefits that they grant, but notes that developers blacklist support for users who have APE installed because it causes a lot of conflicts with other software. Being new to the Mac, I don't want to take any risks, so I'm going to uninstall APE and PullTabs and just work with Witch, and assign the Window Switching fucntion to the Option+Tab keys, which don't seem to be used for anything. (Tab Switching is done with Ctrl+Tab)

Anyway, since I made the post, I didn't want others having this same problem, and besides, this actually makes the installation much simpler. Just get Witch and configure it:

http://www.manytricks.com/witch/

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