The Terminal defaults to being a bunch of boring black on white text, and sure you can change the appearance to other themes, add colors, background images, opacity, transparencies, and other UI customizations, but what you really want is obviously a rainbow version of the cat command for input and output, right? Right, of course … Read More
Most Mac users know that hitting the Command+W keyboard shortcut will close the currently active window, but with a slight modification and by adding an additional key press, you can close all windows in just about any Mac OS X app or the Mac Finder. What is this super excellent keyboard shortcut for closing everything? … Read More
The Maps app in Mac OS X is a useful tool to pre-plan routes, generate map files for offline usage, send directions to an iPhone, and much more, but one critical cartographic component that’s missing by default from all Maps views is any sort of scale indicator, making it difficult to get an idea of … Read More
Apple has released an update to OS X Mavericks, versioned as 10.9.4. The update brings several significant bug fixes and security updates, and is recommended to install for all Mac users running OS X Mavericks. Notably, the OS X 10.9.4 update resolves a frustrating problem where a Mac would not automatically rejoin a trusted Wi-Fi … Read More
If you have multiple PDF files that you want to combine into a single PDF file, you can rely on the Macs bundled Preview app to accomplish this. Not only can Preview combine a variety of single or multi-page PDF docs into a single file, you can even add images as pages, remove a page … Read More
Note: This is an advanced topic aimed at expert Mac users. Macs are generally thought of as secure, certainly at least compared to the alternative world of Windows. But the reality is that while Macs are generally more secure than Windows, there is still legitimate potential for malware getting through to Mac OS X, despite … Read More
The next time you’re stuck trying to figure out a terminal command, or maybe you’re just trying to learn a new one, don’t be afraid to ask for help… from the OS X Terminal apps very own Help menu. Yes seriously, that’s because the Help menu of Terminal app can serve as a man (manual) … Read More
You can customize the menu bar clock that appears in the upper right corner of your Mac to include more than just the current time, and one of the more useful things to add is the current date. This is particularly helpful in OS X because unless you have the Calendar app open all the … Read More
Nearly all web browsers default to keeping a list of recent searches which are easily retrievable as part of the browser history. Safari shows this recent search list when the URL bar is clicked into with the cursor, revealing the 10 most recent web search terms or phrases. That recent search list can be convenient … Read More
While it’s fairly easy to copy a folder path from the Mac GUI and Finder, or even to copy the path into the Terminal with a drag & drop trick, going the other direction and getting the current path from the command line and then having it accessible to the broader OS X clipboard is … Read More
Apple has released OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 2 to Mac users running OS X 10.10 beta builds. The new build includes many bug fixes, feature enhancements, and additions to the beta release of OS X, and arrives versioned as 14A261i. The updated build is available to download through the Mac App Store, and Mac … Read More
Many Mac users use utilities to temporarily prevent their computer from sleeping, often relying on sleep corners, the third party tool called Caffeine, pmset, or more recently, the command line utility that is now bundled with OS X called caffeinate. By default, the Caffeine menubar item and the caffeinate command both will prevent sleep as … Read More
Cropping is an essential image editing function, helping to improve composition of a photo, to emphasize the focus of an image, or to reduce unnecessary parts of a picture. While many Mac users use third party tools to perform image cropping, no additional apps are needed to perform the task in OS X, because the … Read More
The Mac issues a warning when an attached disk, drive, or volume has not been ejected properly, this is to insure against data loss on the drive in question, and it is good advice to follow. Of course the next obvious question for so many newcomers to the Mac platform is how on earth to … Read More
Anytime you find yourself reading something particularly interesting, worthwhile, or helpful on the web (like OSXDaily.com) you may find yourself wishing you could share the active URL quickly with someone else. While many users may manually copy and paste the sites URL to an email client, there’s a better way that is supported by both … Read More
VIM is a very powerful command line text editor that is loved by experts and often hated by novices, mostly because it has a fairly steep learning curve that may seem unintuitive to those who aren’t familiar with it. Even something as simple as quitting out of VIM can seem like a challenge to those … Read More
Many Safari users have noticed that when trying to save a raw audio file or video file that is loaded directly from the web within Safaris media viewer tab or window, the “Save As” default option will bring about a ‘.webarchive’ file – not exactly the multimedia file that users are looking to save. This … Read More
Most longtime command line users rely on the cp command to copy files and directories, but Mac OS X offers another solution with the ‘ditto’ command. Ditto is slightly more advanced but can be advantageous to ‘cp’ for several reasons, as it not only preserves ownership attributes and permissions but also file resource forks and … Read More
