While macOS may only have just under 10 percent of the world’s operating system market share, you have made a fantastic choice by purchasing a Mac. There are many cool things to do on a Mac that you can’t do on any other machine!
- Homebrew App Store
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- Install Homebrew On Mac
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I also had to run: brew doctor And follow its advice, which included running brew prune The prune step was the critical one in my case. Apparently brew cleanup didn't remove all the dead symlinks from /usr/local/bin, and doing a brew install inkscape got really confused as a result. – burlyearly Aug 27 '14 at 19:16. If you prefer Homebrew, you'll probably know what to do: brew cask install mounty To support further development of Mounty, we encourage you to make a donation via Paypal: From the icon in menu bar you can always bring a finder window to front to manage the contents of the mounted drive. Or maybe you want to install iterm2 so you can have that cool drop-down command line available from anywhere. Brew cask install iterm2. Cask can install tons of applications in Mac OS without needing to download them individually from various websites and then going through the typical drag-and-drop install routine. Homebrew App Store: Download and manage your homebrew located on SD card directly from your WiiU. Vgmoose: Thread: git: LameIRCu: An IRC Client for the WiiU, using an USB Keyboard. Brienj: Thread: None yet, soon here git: TCPGecko: Realtime debugger and memory editor using TCP to communicate with the computer. Needs PyGecko or Gecko dot net on.
This operating system is designed to be easy to use, but it packs a lot of power under the surface. We’re here to help you make the most of your machine.
In this list, you’ll find productivity tips, fun easter eggs, and a whole lot more! Are you ready to start making the most of your Mac? Then keep reading and discover awesome things to do on a Mac!
1. Add to Your Reading List in a Snap
Safari no longer supports RSS feeds. While other browsers like Chrome do offer this functionality, you may want to keep using Safari anyway. If you do, there’s a great substitute feature called Reading List. https://browninner912.weebly.com/blog/does-photos-app-take-up-storage-on-mac.
What Reading List does is add a temporary bookmark to pages that you want to return to, but don’t want to save to your main bookmarks.
Homebrew App Store
This feature isn’t exactly hidden, but it isn’t too well known, either. If you want to add to your reading list in seconds, we’ve got a quick way to do that.
On a web page, hold down shift+cmd+d. It’s that easy. The best part about this is that your reading list stays in sync across all your Apple devices!
2. Play a Game of Chess
Are you a chess fiend? Then we’re willing to bet that you’ll find this to be one of your favorite cool things to do on a Mac! All Mac computers come with Chess preinstalled.
If you want to access chess, you need to go to your applications folder. There, you’ll find the game ready to go!
You can play against the computer or another human player. In preferences, you can even change the look of the chess set! Glass, marble, and metal are all available options.
Within preferences, you can also change the game’s difficulty. On top difficulties, you may as well be playing Deep Blue
3. Take Your Pick of Office Software!
If you’ve only used Windows before, you may be used to Microsoft Office. While MS Office is available on Mac and has been for some time, it isn’t your only choice!
Your Mac will come preinstalled with iWork, Apple’s productivity suite! This is a fantastic set of software that’s capable of saving and opening MS Office formats.
If you want yet more choice, then take a look at LibreOffice! This free productivity suite can be installed easily and does everything you’d want! If you’re interested in learning more about productivity on Mac, Setapp wrote a book about Mac productivity!
4. Set Up Speech Recognition and Improve Productivity
Do you want to make your work even faster? Then you could do with setting up the Mac’s built-in speech recognition system! One of the coolest things to do on a Mac, you can command your computer to do various things using only your voice!
To set it up, you’ll need to go to App, then System Preferences, then Accessibility, and finally Speakable Items.
Here, if you click on the radio button, you’ll be able to program various phrases into your Mac that correspond to different commands. Simply set a keybinding that will allow the Mac to record your speech, and you’re on your way!
Quit out of this menu and you’ll be able to start using voice commands straight away!
5. Annotate PDFs without Additional Software
Editing PDFs can be a chore. On Windows, you need to download specialist software to edit these documents. This is not the case on Mac!
One of the really cool things to do on a Mac is load up Preview, the built-in PDF viewer and editor. In Preview, you can annotate and edit PDFs natively, without downloading any other software.
If you’d like to add your signature to the document, that’s easy to too! Hold up a piece of paper with your signature to the webcam, and it will be added to the document!
6. Use Your Photostream as Your Wallpaper
If you’d like a changeable wallpaper, then you need to set up your iCloud’s photostream as your wallpaper! While you can add individual photos to serve as the background, you can also use the entire Photostream.
To do this, you need to follow a few easy steps. Load up the Display and Screen Saver settings. Here, you need to select your iCloud Photostream as the library. Then, pick a folder for your Mac to source images from.
If you’d prefer to keep your wallpaper static, you can use the Photostream as your screensaver instead!
7. Swipe Between Your Open Apps on Macbooks
Looking for cool things to do with a Macbook Air or Macbook? Then you’ll love this tip, which is exclusive to Macs with a trackpad. You might think that multitouch is limited to your iPhone, but that couldn’t be further from the truth! And with more people using social media apps on their mobile devices than ever before, it’s important to not only download and use the right ones, but also make sure they are seamless and fast to navigate through as well.
Your trackpad is equipped with multitouch, too! You can use this to swipe between open apps.
Put three fingers on the trackpad and swipe left or right to navigate between fullscreen apps. If you swipe up with three fingers, you’ll open up Mission Control, and if you swipe down, you’ll open up Expose. Using these tips can speed up your navigation!
8. Make Summaries of Long Documents
If you’re a writer, a student, or regularly need to write long documents, you’ll love this feature. You know how constricting word counts can be. I’m wrestling with that right now!
If you use a Mac, you can make summaries in a second, all without lifting a finger! To summarize a document, you need to enable this feature. Go to System Preferences, then Keyboard, then Shortcuts, then Services: here, enable Summarize!
To summarize text, highlight the text you want to summarize. Then right-click, hit Services, then Summarize! This feature will pull out the most salient points and make rewriting a breeze.
9. Rename Multiple Files at One Time
Sometimes having an organized filesystem can seem impossible. Beamer app mac alternative. Renaming a huge batch of files one at a time is no way to get it sorted, either. Luckily, on Mac, you can rename batches of files in a snip!
Highlight all the files that you want to rename. Then just click on “rename x files,” where x is the number of files selected.
This will open up a window that lets you rename the whole batch of files in one go.
10. Text from Your Mac
Did you think that texting had to be limited to your phone? That’s not true! If you want to, you can set up your Mac to both send and receive texts. You don’t even need an iPhone to do this! As reported by many Apple Tech fan blogs, this is one of the top favorite features that people love, but many average users simply don’t know about.
To set this feature up, you need to set up your new Mac with the same email address that your iMessage account is linked to. Then head to Settings, then Messages on your iPhone. Here, turn on Text Message Forwarding.
Click on a phone number in your contacts, and you can send texts! This will also use iMessage, in the same way that texting from iPhone to iPhone does.
11. Find Apps with Ease
Do you know the name of an application that you want to use, but don’t have a shortcut to hand? Never fear, you can still find that app!
Load up Launchpad and start typing the name of the app that you want to use. The list of apps that have been pulled up will get smaller with each keystroke. You’ll soon be greeted with the app that you want to use.
If you need to find apps quickly and without any fuss, learning to learn Launchpad is essential!
12. Encrypt Folders
If you’ve been watching TV recently, you may have seen the privacy ads that Apple is running. Apple has got some excellent approaches to privacy, and one of the best examples of this can be found in one of the cool things to do on a Mac: encrypting files and folders.
If you want to protect your data from prying eyes, it couldn’t be easier.
In Disk Utility, go to File, New, and Blank Disk Image. Set its name, location, and size, and choose your encryption method. Hit Create.
Congrats! You now have a secure location on your disk where you can save all your most important files!
Cool Things to Do on a Mac: Making Your Life Better
We hope that you like these cool things to do on a Mac. Every tip that we’ve talked about can make your life a little easier. Start using all of these and your productivity will increase!
Do you want to read more informative posts like these? Follow Apple Gazette on social media and see our posts as soon as they’re published!
Homebrew Apps Ps3
If the zsh shell that Apple provides in Mac OS X is out of date, as it has been in Yosemite and El Capitan, it’s trivial to install the latest version, available on
homebrew
. Here’s a couple of steps you need to do to make that your default. Read on, for how to do it.Initial Confirmations
Confirm the current active
zsh
version:Confirm the location of
zsh
:OS X’s
dscl
command is a command line utility for performing operations on the Directory Services database.Homebrew Apps Mac
OS X’s
dscl
command is a command line utility for performing operations on the Directory Services database.Cw app download mac. Confirm the shell that’s set for your user:
The
.
is short for localhost
, and the $USER
variable expands to your username.In a previous iteration of this post, I mentioned looking into
/etc/shells
to find out what shells your OS X knows about. It’s not necessary to view or append this file, if you’re setting your shell with dscl
like we’ll do below. It seems that /etc/shells
is used to specify allowable user shells for users connecting via FTP, and it used to need to be edited to include any new shells, that you were going to change to using chsh
.Upgrade zsh with brew
Assuming you have
brew
installed, use brew install zsh
to install.Confirm brew’s zsh location
Apple provides
/usr/local
for OS X users to install packages to and it’s already in your system path, so that’s where brew
installs. Confirm it:But you can also use
brew
commands to confirm the details about the package: Install macos mojave app download.And…
Use the brew zsh
To use the
zsh
that brew installed, use dscl
.After that, restart your Terminal to have it take effect. You can also use System Preferences. Open Users & Groups, ctrl-click your username, then select “Advanced Options”. You can select your shell in there.
Now if you run
which
again, you’ll see the system is recognizing the one you installed:And confirming the version again shows:
In standard linux, and in previous versions of Mac OS X, you would add a new shell like
/usr/local/bin/zsh
to /etc/shells
, then use chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh
to change to it.In standard linux, and in previous versions of Mac OS X, you would add a new shell like
/usr/local/bin/zsh
to /etc/shells
, then use chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh
to change to it.Et voilà! The
zsh
that is first in your path is now the upgraded version from brew
.Confirm You’re Running Brew zsh
Now you can confirm which shell you are running with a couple of different commands.
First, repeat the command you used above to confirm:
That’s the most precise way to confirm. Next, try echoing an environment variable (case matters):
It should be the same result. Finally, check the name of the running process by doing
echo $0
. It should return -zsh
.Set Shell within Terminal App
Get iTerm 2 if you haven’t got it already. The version 3 beta is especially good, as of April 2016.
Get iTerm 2 if you haven’t got it already. The version 3 beta is especially good, as of April 2016.
You can also set the shell within your terminal app, though I haven’t tested this, and am not sure if there’s any negative aspect to doing so.
- OS X Terminal - Preferences, General, “Shells Open With” and set the path to your preferred shell.
- iTerm 2 - Preferences, Profiles, General, Command.
I believe what this does is to store the selection within a
plist
file for that app, and ignore the user shell.Handling Upgrades
There are a couple of considerations to keep in mind any time you upgrade OS X.
First, your shell might get reset, so check it to be sure.
Secondly, OS X El Capitan (v 10.11) has a new security system called “System Integrity Protection”, which is set up to be stricter with the security of
/usr/local
, among other things. Since this is where brew
keeps its files, you’ll likely need to reset security on it by running the following command:If you upgrade
brew
using brew update
or brew upgrade
, it will inform you if there’s a problem with permissions on /usr/local
.Supercharging Zsh
It’s a matter for another post, but if you like
zsh
and want some cool tools for it, check out Oh My Zsh!, an open source framework for managing zsh
config.Updates
- 9 Apr 2016 - updated post to reflect more sure-fire way to set the zsh from the command line: use
dscl
. Left information about/etc/shells
andchsh
in as an aside. Added information about selecting the shell in Terminal Preferences. - 25 Mar 2016 - checked version of
zsh
in OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan. It’szsh 5.0.8 (x86_64-apple-darwin15.0)
, which is still out of date and in fact, an even more pronounced version lag compared to thev5.2
now being distributed viabrew
. Added how to check which shell you actually are using, and a couple points about handling upgrades. - 24 Mar 2016 - cleaned up the post a bit. Added restarting Terminal, per comments (thanks!). Added ack section. Added link to Oh My Zsh!.
Acknowledgements:
The banner photo has nothing to do with zsh. It’s a photo I took of hula dancers at Shonan Mall near Fujisawa, a number of years ago. See the original here.
Thanks to Kirk Beard and Adam in the comments, regarding restarting Terminal to have the
chsh
take effect.Thanks to Trent Lucier for pointing out to me that it can be set in your Terminal program’s preferences.
Install Homebrew On Mac
About the Author
Mac Homebrew Tutorial
I'm Rick Cogley, and thanks for reading. I'm an experienced technologist, co-founder & -owner of eSolia Inc. I'm from America originally, but have been helping people and companies succeed in Japan since 1987. I'm an avid jogger, lover of music and puzzles, and family man with a wonderful wife and daughters. Please do me a favor and share and link to this post, comment on it, and maybe connect with me on other social sharing sites as well. Cheers!
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