The Macbook Neo appears to be a massive sales hit for Apple and popular as first Mac for people – including myself. But coming from Windows, macOS handles and feels quite different, and the default setup doesn’t help. Here are a couple of hints to make your journey easier. I’ve described everything just briefly, you might have to search online to find out how to enable or install certain things.
Essential settings
Tap to click – instead of having to physically depress the trackpad, with this setting it is sufficient to tap it.
Two finger tapping – serves as a right mouse click.
Three finger dragging – does the same thing as depressing the left mouse button and dragging the mouse. Essential for moving and resizing windows, drag & drop, etc.
Four finger gestures – mission control (show all open applications, unless hidden) and app exposé (show all application windows). This is faster in many cases than using the dock or Command+Tab.
Function keys – by default these activate the secondary options, as is now common under Windows, too. But I hit F5 much more often to start a program in my IDE than e.g. changing the volume, so I want the function keys to be just that, and use the fn key for the secondary functions. This is, like the other options, changed in the system settings, not with some Fn lock combination like on Windows devices.
Screen scaling – the Neo’s default setting makes text quite large, which is fine if you have poor eyesight, but takes up a lot of space on a small display. I much prefer the “small” setting.
MacOS doesn’t have a conventional task bar like Windows and most Linux desktop environments. There’s the top application menu that also has the stuff that would be in the lower right of the Windows task bar (battery and WiFi status, clock, etc.) and the dock. The dock serves both as application launcher and as task bar of sorts, with dots signifying open applications. The dock can be made to auto-hide, and it will pop up when the mouse cursor approaches the bottom of the screen when an window is maximized. But I tend to have windows just fill the screen between top menu and dock, and have hence made the dock quite small (low, that is), with icons being enlarged when the mouse is over them.
Essential shortcuts
There’s a massive amount of shortcuts available, thanks to the control, option, and command keys. Apple has an article on the subject. If you continue to use Windows and/or Linux alongside macOS, I highly recommend to switch the control and command keys to keep you from going crazy. That means that at least cut/copy/paste will be the usual ctrl+x/c/v combinations. Control+ the arrow keys then takes the place of the home/end/pg up/pg down keys. Ctrl+w closes windows, ctrl+q applications – closing the last window of an application does not terminate the application! Replace Control with command if you decided to stick with the default mapping.
Fn+Backspace does what the Del key does normally (delete to the right of the cursor), but backspace in some cases serves as the delete button.
Essential software
Homebrew – the apt of the macOS world. Used for installing many third-party applications.
LinearMouse – by default, the trackpad and mouse scrolling direction cannot be configured independently from each other. LinearMouse solves this.
Windows App – Remote desktop application to connect to remote computers, my go-to solution to access other computers in my home network.
KeepassXC – password manager. If you store the database in a location that is shared across devices (Google Drive, OneDrive, Nextcloud) you don’t need one of the paid cloud services that are often targeted by hackers.
Caffeine – prevents your Mac from going to sleep. Since Macs awake pretty much instantly, it is common to have them go to sleep quickly after a few minutes, too – but that can be annoying, especially when you’re just monitoring some long-running process. With Caffeine, you just click the coffee cup in the top menu and that’ll keep the computer awake.
BetterDisplay – if you use non-Apple external displays, you’ll probably want this app to set resolution, HiDpi mode, and adjust screen brightness.
