So you’ve decided to make the switch to Mac. Congratulations, Macs are great computers. But there are a few important differences between Mac OS and Windows. Here is a handy guide to some of the neat or just plain useful things that you can do with your Mac. These are things you will need to know how to do, things you might want to do and things that you can do, should you have the desire.
Tips for things you need to know.
The Command button will do most of the functions of the Ctrl button on a Windows machine. So instead of pressing Ctrl-S to save a document, you press Command-S. To undo a mistake, you don’t press Ctrl-Z, you press Command-Z. Command also sometimes replaces the Alt button. For example, Alt-tab in Windows will toggle through open programs. This same function is provided on a Mac by Command-Tab.
Command-Option-Esc will bring up the “Force Quit” dialog box. If you are a Windows user and are looking for the equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Del, this is it. While Macs are much more stable than Windows Machines, occasionally, programs will crash and become unresponsive. Use Command-Option-Esc to kill them.
But there are two parts of the Ctrl-Alt-Del window: one part will force-quit your programs and the other will tell you everything that’s running and how much of the processor each program is taking up. Mac has this as well. It’s called Activity Monitor. It is on your hard drive under Applications-Utilities-Activity Monitor. This is a very useful little program.
Clicking the red button on the top right of a window does not close the program, just the window. This is something a lot of Windows users (myself included) have trouble with when they switch to Mac. To actually close a program, you have to go to the Program menu (the name of the program on the top right, next to the Apple menu). You then select ‘Quit [Name of Program]’.
.exe files are called .app. This is just a really useful piece of information. Don’t try to run .exes, they won’t work.
Tricks you don’t really need, but will make your life easier.
You can move the Dock. (The Dock is the little bar on the bottom with all your programs in it, I didn’t know it was called when I first got my Mac) If you have a Mac and also have a wide-screen monitor, you tend to have a lot of spare space horizontally, but not so much vertically. This is why relocating the Dock is a good idea. You fill some of the space you aren’t using and you get some extra space that you can use. Go to the Apple menu (top-right) and select Dock. Then select either ‘Position on right’ or ‘Position on left’.
The Dock opens a program, but it will also bring that window to the front. The Dock fills the roles of both the Start menu and the icons along the bottom of the screen in Windows.
Command-Shift-3 will take a screenshot of the entire screen. This could be useful for proving things happened to people on the Internet, seeing the internet is home to the phrase “screenshot or it didn’t happen”. The picture will be saved as a .png file on the desktop.
Command-Shift-4 will allow you to take a picture of a selected area. Simply drag a square around the area you want to capture. This is useful for saving parts of websites, or showing things to other people without also showing them your desktop.
There are several other screenshot tricks that I won’t go into here. For example, Command-Shift-4, then space-bar, then click a window.
Double-clicking on the top of a window will minimize it to the dock. Holding down shift while double-clicking on the top of a window will minimize it to the dock in slow motion. As far as I can tell, this serves no practical purpose whatsoever, but it does look cool. Shift=clicking the minimized window will open it in slow motion.
