The Mac shortcuts and small features nobody tells you about

Fourteen minutes, and no app is installed at any point in it. This is a tour of the parts of macOS that are already there, and its value is in the density: thirty-odd techniques, most of them one modifier key away from something you were doing the long way.

The Dock section shows how much is packed into it. Dragging a file onto a Dock icon opens that file in that app rather than its default one — the demonstration is an SVG that double-clicks into Illustrator but opens elsewhere when dragged onto another icon. Dragging the thin divider on the Dock’s right edge resizes it; holding Shift while dragging the divider moves the whole Dock to the side of the screen; the right-click menu hides it altogether. Once it is hidden, ⌘Tab switches between running apps and ⌘Space finds one that is not running.

The two sections worth watching twice are screenshots and Preview. After ⇧⌘4 starts a selection, holding Space drags the frame instead of redrawing it, and a single press of Space snaps the frame to the window under the pointer; ⇧⌘5 opens the toolbar whose Record button is the built-in way to capture the screen. Then Preview, which the video calls the quietest and most powerful app on the Mac: drop a second PDF into the sidebar and the two merge, drag a thumbnail out of the window and that page becomes its own file, and the same window crops, resizes, adjusts and even removes a background from an image, before trimming a video by dragging the handles on its yellow frame.

Between those are the ones people ask about in forums. ⇧⌥⌘V pastes as plain text. ⌃⌘Space opens the emoji panel. Holding ⌥ in a File menu turns Duplicate into Save As. Holding ⌥ while dragging a file in Finder copies it instead of moving it, and ⌥-clicking an app’s red close button closes all of that app’s windows. Get Info (⌘I) changes a file’s default app for every file of its type through Change All, and its Stationery Pad checkbox turns the file into a template that reopens as a fresh copy.

One honest caveat. At 11:13 the video says “if you have a window manager like Magnet installed” and moves on — that is the only third-party app named in fourteen minutes, and it is named as an example of a category rather than reviewed. Nothing else here needs installing. The other caveat is age: this was recorded in June 2022 on macOS Monterey, so System Preferences is now System Settings and several of the menu-bar items it drags around have moved. The key combinations have not.