Knowing Your Mac…. Loving Your Mac

(General Macintosh Workflow and Shortcuts)

Since many of our incoming students have limited experience using macintosh computers, here are a few basic pointers that will guide you to an everlasting love, or at least uneasy peace, them.

The Finder:

Finder is the way in which you interact at base level with the mac.. For the techies in here, it is analogous to windows explorer. The desktop, and all file folders are accessed through finder. Finder is ever-present; it is the interface of the Macintosh.

Opening folders:

Multiple folders can be opened, modified, or deleted by selecting them at the same time by holding the mouse button down and dragging, or shift selecting them

Double clicking on any folder will open a new window showing its contents. Holding the option key will open the new folder and close the previous folder. This is a great way to keep you from being deluged by tons of open windows.

Opt+doubleclick: open new window and close old window.

By pressing the first letter of a file name on the keyboard, the folder will automatically scroll to the file and select it.

When a file or folder is selected (by single clicking or keyboard selection), pressing return will rename it! Windows users take note.

The control key opens a list of commands that may be applied to the file or folder, similar to a right click on a pc.

At the top of the open folder, there are three buttons. The left button will close the window, the middle button will automatically resize the window, and the rightmost button will minimize the window, but keep the top toolbar visible.

Viewing/Accessing Folders and Files:

There are several ways of viewing the contents of the folders. These are accessed, predictably, from the view drop down menu at the top of the screen.

To view the files/folders as:

Icons: Standard viewing interface. Double-clicking on an icon will access it. No big surprises here.

A folder with view as icons selected

Buttons: The icons have a border around them and are accessed with a single click. Functionally useless.

a folder with view as buttons selected

List: Viewing the folder as a list allows you to open sub-folders by clicking down on the arrow to the left. Viewing as a list lets you sort by name, date-modified, size, and kind of file by clicking on the button at the top of the screen.

a folder with view as list selected

pop-up window: This feature puts a button at the bottom of the screen that allows you to open and close the folder with a single click. This can be useful if you are working with a large number of files in the same folder

If your folder becomes disorganized, pressing view-clean up will arrange your icons by grid.

Deleting Folders and Files:

Note: delete and del are two different keys in Mac world

To delete a folder or file, simply select it and drag it to the trash or press command/apple+ delete.

To empty the trash, go to the special drop menu and hit empty trash, or press shift+cmd+delete

Applications:

To open an application, click on the apple menu, move to applications, then single click your application.

The toolbar at the top of the screen will change to the application’s toolbar. Also, the bar at the top right of the screen will change to the name and icon of the application.

Moving between Applications:

To move between open applications, click on the top right button and scroll between them, or simply click on any portion of the application open on the screen. You can also create a window that will show active applications by clicking on the button, then dragging it off of the toolbar. A common frustration of people using Macs is that they click outside of the program area and are moved into a different program unwittingly. Take a bit of time to adjust, and moving back and forth will become second nature.

Closing Applications

Please make sure to quit all applications when you have finished using them. Unlike a PC, all Mac applications must be closed from the File-Quit dropdown menu or cmd/apple+Q. Ex: if you open Internet Explorer, parse a few websites, then close the browser window, the windows will close, but Internet Explorer will still be active and visible in the top right corner. You must do this manually by going to File-quit, or pressing cmd/apple+Q