7 Mac Tips and Tricks for Professional and Personal Use

In the fourth fiscal quarter of 2020, Apple said that they shipped out over six million MacBooks to customers around the world.

If you were one of those people who bought a MacBook recently, you might be wondering if there are any Mac tips and tricks to help make using your laptop easier.

Thankfully, you came to the right place! Keep reading to find out all the cool things to do with a MacBook Pro.

Use Emojis For Your Folders

To turn your folders into emojis, just go to your desktop and make a new folder. Then go on Safari and find a picture of the emoji that you want to turn that folder into. Once you’ve downloaded that image, drag it onto your desktop.

In order to make it look good, you should make it a little bit more transparent. You can do this by using the markup icon and changing the background of the image. When there are lines around it, just go to Edit and then Cut.

Now go back to your markup icon and drag a box around your emoji. Copy it and then go back to your new folder. Right-click on it.

You’ll see an option that says Get Info. Once you click on that, you can paste the image in and your folder will turn into your emoji.

Add Spacers in Your Dock Bar

One of the other Mac tips and tricks is to make your Dock bar a little bit more spacious. To do this, you’ll just have to open your Terminal.

Go to utilities, and then you’ll have to type this in: “defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{“tile-type”=”spacer-tile”;}’; killall Dock”.

Once you’ve typed that in, you can hit Return. The Dock will disappear for a moment, but when you go out of Terminal, you can drag the tiles to be as spaced out as you want them to be!

Use Keyboard Shortcuts

If you want to learn how to speed up your workflow, learning how to use keyboard shortcuts is the way to go. For example, you can click an option that lets you control your mouse using only your keyboard.

You can find this under Accessibility settings. You can go to Pointer Control, and then choose Alternate Control Methods. Then, you’ll be able to turn on an option that says Enable Mouse Keys.

You can also use the function keys to do things like changing your brightness, play media, change your volume, and more!

However, there are plenty of Mac keyboard shortcuts that you can create on your own as well.

Unlock Your Computer With Your Watch

If you have an Apple Watch, did you know that you can use it to unlock your computer? If both devices are registered under the same Apple ID, you can wake up your Mac by pressing any button on your watch.

To set this up, go to System Preferences on your computer. You’ll find a tab that says Security and Privacy. There, you can check all of the devices you want to be allowed to unlock your device.

You should find your watch listed under there.

Recover Your Password

If you don’t have an Apple Watch or a phone, you will have to use your password to log in. But what happens if you forgot it? Thankfully you can just use Recovery Mode.

To do this, first, make sure that you turn off your computer. Then press and hold the Command button and the R. After that, press the power button.

Once you see the Apple logo pop up, your computer is now in the Recovery menu. You’ll be able to go to your Utilities menu and go to Terminal.

A command screen will pop up, and you should type in: “resetpassword.” Press return.

The window will close and bring up the tool to help you reset your password so you can successfully log in!

Rename Groups of Files

To batch rename files, you’ll have to highlight all of the ones that you want to change. Once you’ve done that, use Command and click all of them. Then you’ll be able to see an option that lets you rename all of them.

You can customize it a little bit, however. You can decide to replace their current names with all one thing. Or you can just edit some of the texts. You can even change the date as well!

Use Text Replacements

Mac will realize what phrase or common word you’re going to type next and automatically fill it in for you. You can set up shortcuts to type so that it knows to fill in a certain phrase of text so that you don’t have to type it all out.

You can go to System Preferences, and then Keyboard. You’ll be able to see a Text option there, which is where you can type in all your word shortcuts!