7 essential mac OS tricks users never knew about

Just like windows, Mac has its own set of tricks that it can perform with the shortcuts it provides. These 7 tips and tricks are extremely useful. Yet, you never knew about them!

Incremental Volume

Often when you’re listening to music or watching a movie, either the volume is too loud or too less. Mac offers the perfect solution with ¼ volume increments. This trick works with brightness as well.

Increase/Decrease volume or brightness by pressing the function buttons (F1/F2 or F11/F12) with option + shift key.

Negative Display/Dark Mode

Even though apple now plans to add a ‘Dark Mode’ to its latest Mac OS X offering –Yosemite, there is a way you can run your Mac device running Mavericks or earlier versions with a dark theme.

To make this feature work, you need to first go to System Preferences < Keyboard < Shortcuts Tab < Accessibility (from the list on the left) and select the option ‘Invert Colors’. Once selected, you can press Control + Option + Command + 8 to activate the feature.

Silent Turn On/Off

If you’re like me and hate it when your Mac device makes a sound when it is turned on, you can make it boot in silence by pressing the mute key (F10) + Power button.

Clean Text Paste

When you’re copying text from one source to the other, sometimes, hyperlinks and format of the text gets copied to the clipboard too. Too avoid this, copy the text as you normally would (Command + C) and press Command + Control + V to paste unformatted text. It’ll save you the hassle of formatting text all over again.

Define Anything

Did you know, your Mac and iOS devices come with an in built dictionary? To use it, either select the text and press Command + Control + D to define the selected text or just use this shortcut and the text around the cursor or mouse pointer will be defined for you.

This feature works well in browsers (including the address bar) and within default applications like any PDF opened with preview. Unfortunately, this does not work with 3^rd party applications like Microsoft Office.

Special Characters

Sometimes you want to type or search words with special characters but weren’t able to figure out how to type them with the default US keyboard that Apple provides.

Well, the simplest workaround is that you long press the alphabet and get supporting special characters; then, just press the number against the character you desire and boom, it gets typed for you. Thankfully, this feature seems to be working with at least some of the third party applications (Microsoft office).

Preview

The preview app in Mac supports multiple formats. However, unlike windows, you cannot scroll within the folder to view different items. As an alternative, select one of the items within the folder and press spacebar. You can now scroll through multiple items within a folder by simply pressing the left/right direction keys.

You can now proclaim yourself to be a pro mac user! If you've got any shortcuts that you find extremely helpful, share them with the world and help fellow Mac users.

All GIFs courtesy BuzzFeed.