Ten Mac settings that make a Mac stop feeling awkward

Nineteen minutes, ten settings, and a premise worth stating because it is unusual: the creator says at the start that these are the settings he runs himself, not a list of interesting ones. What that buys is proportion — the Dock gets six of the nineteen minutes, the pointer gets one — and a video that is about habits rather than about options.

The section most people have never found is three-finger drag, at 9:12, and the reason is where it lives: System Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control → Trackpad Options, nowhere near the Trackpad pane anyone would search. Enabling it means a window or a selection can be dragged without pressing down at all, which is the answer to the click-and-drag that a large trackpad makes awkward.

Two of the ten are reversals rather than additions. “Click wallpaper to reveal desktop” — introduced in Sonoma and on by default — makes a click on empty desktop hide every window, which is startling the first time it happens; turning it off at 7:51 is the whole of that chapter. The pointer-size slider at 6:10 is there because a large display at default scaling leaves a pointer small enough to lose track of.

The rest are the settings a new Mac arrives without. The battery percentage, off by default on Apple Silicon, is a Control Centre toggle. Hot corners get the best advice in the video: a corner is far safer with a modifier key required, so it cannot fire on the way to somewhere else. And the screen saver section ends where it should, at requiring a password the moment the screen saver starts — which is what makes locking the screen worth doing at all.

Recorded in November 2023 on macOS Sonoma, so the pane names match Sonoma and later releases have moved some of them again. The settings themselves — three-finger drag, hot corners, the battery percentage — have survived every release since, which is the useful part.