Make your Mac easier to use with little known macOS settings

You may think that your Mac is easy to use, but what if you could make it even easier? Use these macOS settings and features to simplify your Mac and make it faster and easier to use.

The Mac and Apple products in general are famous for being easy to use and for the most part they are when compared to rival products, but that does not mean they cannot be improved upon and there are ways of simplifying them even more.

A few tweaks here and changes to settings there can make a significant difference in usability and the speed at which you can get things done. They can make your Mac more fun to use, even when you have work to do. Let's take a look.

Learn keyboard shortcuts

This has to be the number one way to make the Mac easier to use. There is a keyboard shortcut for almost everything and if you can hit a key to perform an action, it is faster and easier than going to a menu or worse still, sub-menus of menus..

For example, everyone knows that Cmd+Q quits an app and you can even press the keys one-handed. Cmd+A (select all), Cmd+C (copy), Cmd+X (cut) and Cmd+V (paste) are other common keyboard shortcuts.

This is not the place for a complete list of keyboard shortcuts and it is easy to discover them anyway. In macOS and every app, browse the menus at the top of the screen and the keyboard shortcut for many items is displayed. Display a menu and hold down Option to see alternative menus in some cases. On the File menu you will often see Cmd+S to save for example.

More keyboard shortcuts can be seen in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Select items on the right to see them. Sometimes you can make your own keyboard shortcuts, such as System Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners. Learn as many as you can.

Improve the display

There are several ways to improve the display and one is by selecting the best screen resolution? Which is best, well that depends on you and it is a personal choice.

Go to System Preferences > Displays and choose Scaled on the Display tab. Then choose the resolution that suits you best. High resolutions enable you to see more on the desktop without overlapping windows so much, but low resolutions are easier on the eye. It’s your choice.

Don't forget the Night Shift options, which automatically adjusts the colour according to the time of the day. It reduces the blue and increases the red in the evening.

Go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and there are several options that can make the Mac easier to use. Reduce Transparency for example. Transparent menus and windows are more difficult to read for some people because the background is distracting and there is also less contrast between the text and background. Turn it off. Unnecessary animations are an irritation for me, so I enable Reduce Motion.

Also here is Cursor Size and it can be made a bit bigger if it is hard to see. There is also an option to shake the mouse (or rub the trackpad with a finger) to locate the pointer and it makes it super-size for a second so you can see it more easily.

Learn trackpad gestures

There are many trackpad gestures that make using the Mac easier. For example, if the text on a web page if the text is too small, use pinch and spread like you would on a phone to zoom in and out. This gesture also works in the Maps and Photos apps and some other places too.

Hold down Ctrl and push up and down with two fingers on the trackpad to zoom the whole screen, which is handy when it is set to a high resolution and you want to see something small. If this is not working, go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom and tick the box, Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.

Go to System Preferences > Trackpad for more clicks and gestures than you can possibly remember. Don't even try, just pick a few favourites to memorise.

Dictate, don't type

In many places where you type text, you can speak it instead. Dictation is built into macOS and it has a speech-to-text feature that means you can speak almost everywhere you would normally type. This is not always desirable though and it depends where you are using your Mac. It would not be suitable for using in a library where silence is preferred, but it could be used at home and possibly some offices, depending on the environment.

To enable this, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Dictation and turn it on. For best results and for offline use, tick the checkbox, Use Enhance Dictation.