Mac for Dummies: 5 Useful MacOS Tips for Beginners

Not always the default settings make everyday work with the operating system as convenient and efficient as possible. In this article, we’ve compiled 30 helpful macOS setup tips that can be useful for both novice and experienced Mac users.

Steve Jobs spent a considerable part of his life making Macs as easy to
use as possible - but many of the really useful “tricks” remained
unobvious.

Turn on the right mouse button and change the speed of movement

By default, the right mouse button of the Magic Mouse in macOS is generally disabled, which is very surprising for new Mac users, and the
speed of the cursor leaves much to be desired. In order to configure
both of these parameters, go to  → System settings … → Mouse → Select
and press.

Here we put a tick in front of the second paragraph “Imitation of the
right button (click on the right)”, and below there is a speed control,
unscrewing to the right which, we get just the reactive cursor speed on
the display.

Move the Dock to the right or left side of the desktop

By default, the Dock is located at the bottom of the display, but you
can use the workspace more productively by moving the panel to the left
or right of the display. Thus, the working part of the window will
increase in many applications, for example in Safari, the width of the
page is not as important as the height.

To configure the Dock, go to → System Settings … → Dock and in the
“Location on Screen” column, put a dot in front of “Left” or “Right”.

Minimize application windows to an icon in the Dock

If at some point when working with a particular application you needed
to minimize it, then in the upper left part of the window, click on the
yellow button between the cross and expand. The thumbnail of the program will be minimized to the right side of the Dock with nice animation. But in this case, the program will not collapse into its icon, but an additional thumbnail will be created. If this situation does not suit
you, then everything is fixable.

Go to → System Preferences … → Dock and check the box “Hide window in Dock in program icon”.

After that, by clicking on the “Minimize” button, a thumbnail will not
be created if the program icon already exists in the Dock.

Spotlight - macOS Search Engine

The easiest way to get things done on your Mac faster is to use Spotlight Search. Just press the key combination ⌘Cmd + Space (some may have Ctrl + Space), and you can instantly find files, open applications, search the Internet (yes, it’s not necessary to open a browser for this) or across the entire computer.

Spotlight can also be used as a calculator or currency converter. For example, enter “1000 usd” in the Spotlight search box. The search engine instantly displays the current course.

Lost your cursor?

Just quickly move the mouse left and right, and at the same time look at the screen. The cursor will automatically increase in size, and it will be very difficult not to notice it. If desired, you can disable this feature.