My rule of thumb is: if I’m finished with the computer for the day, or going out for several hours, I’ll turn it off. If you reopen the lid, it’ll wake up immediately.Īsk ten people whether you should shut down a Mac or just close the lid and put it to sleep and you’ll get ten different answers. Press your MacBook’s power button to quickly get to the Shut Down menu. Of course, Macs never crash, so you won’t need to use that. The Mac equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Del is Cmd-Opt-Esc. The Eject key in the top-right corner of the keyboard ejects a CD or DVD. If you hold Fn, you can press the following keys to duplicate their functionality: You might wonder where Page Up and Down, Home and End keys have gone. To quit an open application, press Cmd-Q instead of Alt-F4. One caveat is that you can’t edit documents from the Quick Look window. Pinch open the window and it will fill the whole screen. This is called ‘Quick Look’ and is really useful for PDFs and Word documents. Press the Space bar when you have a file selected to quickly look at its contents. To move a file to the Trash, press Cmd-Delete. Fn is in the bottom-left corner of the keyboard. To delete to the right (what I would call a ‘Forward Delete’) hold the Fn key and press Delete. The backspace key works the same as Windows, but it’s not called Backspace- it’s called ‘Delete’. To open a file you have selected in the Finder, you press Cmd-O. Or you can continue to do that thing where you click on the file, then wait a while, then click it again, then it either lets you rename the file or opens it depending on the computer’s mood. When you have a file selected in the Finder, press Enter to rename it. Here are some of the most common/ confusing ones: Other keyboard commands are genuinely different from Windows. To select multiple items in a list, hold Cmd and click them all. Anywhere you would normally use the Ctrl key, just use Cmd. Macs use Ctrl in combination with a mouse click to do a right click (from the days when Macs really did only have one button). In Windows you use Control as the main modifier key on a Mac, you use Command (Cmd) instead. The other key you might need is a # which you can type by pressing Option/ Alt and 3. You have probably noticed that your keyboard isn’t the same as the one on your previous computer. Right click on a blank space in an application’s toolbar and you can customise the bar’s contents. One really great function that most people forget: right click on the name of a document in its window to show where it lives on your Mac. You don’t even need to push until the trackpad physically clicks if you check the ‘Tap to Click’ box. If you click on the Apple logo and go to System Preferences (the Mac’s Control Panel equivalent), then choose Trackpad, it’ll show you an overview of some handy gestures. Tap with two fingers on the trackpad to right click. Macs can right click! If I had a pound for every moron who made a joke about Macs not having a right click while in my last job, I would have at least thirteen pounds by now. Share it with your family and friends, and share your tips in the comments section!įirst things first: two fingers to an old myth There’s so much here that even experienced Mac users might find a couple of useful tips, but it’s specifically aimed at newbies. Like the helpful son I am, I came to the rescue! I wrote what I thought would be a few hands tips on using the Mac, but it ballooned into a massive list of tips and philosophical differences with Windows.Īlthough I wrote this guide for my dad, I thought it would be a shame not to share it with everyone. Dad is a newcomer to the Mac, after using Windows for many years.
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