7 hidden features on macOS that you should use right away!

1. Pin the system-wide music driver to the menu bar

On a Mac, you don’t have to switch between apps to control the sound that’s playing. macOS allows you to pin generic drivers to the menu bar. With this feature, you can control the sound from any platform, Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube playing in the browser.

Go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar > Now Playing and tick “Show in Menu Bar” to enable this feature. You can also choose to hide this icon if no sound is playing.

2. Turn screen corners into shortcuts

In addition to a flexible combination of hotkeys, macOS also allows you to use the corners of the screen for quick operations via the hot corners feature.

macOS allows assigning some quick actions to the 4 corners of the screen. Just hover your mouse over the corners and the task will be done right away.

To install, go to System Preferences > Mission Control and select “Hot Corners”. In the drop-down box, select the action you want: open quick notes, lock the device or show the notification center …

3. Attach files and folders to the dock

The dock at the bottom of the screen can also store more shortcuts than just favorite apps. To attach a file or folder to the macOS dock, go to the folder containing the file, select the folder/file, hold down the Shift button, and press “File” in the top menu. Click the hidden option “Add to Dock” to create a shortcut right on the dock. In addition, you can also use Ctrl+Cmd+Shift+T to perform this operation.

4. Use macOS’s comprehensive screen capture and capture tool

You may be familiar with the Cmd+Shift+3 or Cmd+Shift+4 key combinations for taking screenshots, but if you press Cmd+Shift+5, you can access macOS’s dedicated Screenshot app. The application has enough options so that you can choose between options to capture or capture part of the screen, the whole screen, by window and more.

5. Double click to minimize the window

By default, when you double-click a window title on macOS, the window will enlarge to the whole screen. From experience, we rarely use this feature and Apple knows it. You can change this function to minimize windows in System Preferences settings > Dock & Menu Bar > “Double-click a window’s title bar to” and select minimise.

6. Auto-run the app on startup

If you often have a certain set of apps on when your Mac starts up, you can set the apps to run automatically to save time, just like Start-up on Windows.

You can set it via System Preferences > Users & Groups, select your username and select Login Items tab on the right. Press the “+” sign and select Applications then the application you want to run when the device boots.

In addition to the applications you can completely let macOS play music, videos or photos, any from the Finder.

7. Access emoji list

If you do not know this feature, inserting emoji on your computer can be very time consuming, especially if the application does not support it. But on macOS, you can quickly open the emoji list whenever you are typing text just press Cmd + Ctrl + Space.

In case you forget the keyboard shortcut, you can stick an emoji button on the menubar by going to System Preferences > Keyboard, Input Sources, “Show input menu in menu bar” settings. Click on the new Input icon that appears on the menu bar and select “Show Emoji & Symbols”.