10 ms·

This is a neat little tool. I had no idea that was hiding in there. Anyone have any other little hidden gems on MacOS?

danpetrov 5y ago
There is also "networksetup", which allows you to do pretty much anything you want with network configuration. Useful if you want to e.g. automate VPN network switching or locations.
- cromka 5y ago
  > Useful if you want to e.g. automate VPN network switching or locations Can you elaborate on that a bit, please?
  - knx 5y ago
    If you have a VPN named "MyVPN" you can start it from the command line with: networksetup -connectpppoeservice "MyVPN".
    - cpuguy83 5y ago
      I use this as part of an ssh ProxyCommand. It's wonderful.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Oh no. Oh no oh no. You don't mean Apple's implemented the Wi-Fi autoconfig functionality Ubuntu failed to deliver in ~2008, do you? Because if they have... they'll have done it... correctly. If the binary and/or supporting libraries have any references to FieldAgents in them... we're doomed. That's Skynet, right there.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    Can you expand a bit? Some quick Googling didn't reveal anything useful to me -- what exactly are you talking about?
    - exikyut 5y ago
      Sure, and apologies (I think my comment went up to 2 points but now at 0, hehe). It's a reference to https://xkcd.com/416/ https://xkcd.com/416/. :P
masklinn 5y ago
“Network Link Conditioner” essentially does the opposite but it’s a really neat tool: it lets you degrade your connection, so you can test how software reacts to degraded network conditions, and don’t need to install and configure third-party proxies and the like. The biggest drawback is it affects the entire machine, you can’t enable the conditioner on a per-process basis, so it can be a bit rough on the other “normal” usage of the machine. There’s also a version on iOS.
- dtaht 5y ago
  Other normal traffic on the machine going through that conditioner has side effects on your application as well.
- gcbirzan 5y ago
  The other major drawback is that you cannot download it without an iCloud account...
mahathu 5y ago
In the file settings ("Get Info") you can set a "stationary pad" flag means whenever the file gets edited, a copy is created, and the original file doesn't change. When you're taking a screenshot of a portion of the screen you can hold the spacebar to move the rectangle around.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  Is this Copy-on-Write? Is the copy a real file or is this a filesystem implementation detail?
  - OskarS 5y ago
    APFS has CoW semantics, so I would assume it uses the APFS filesystem features.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure that feature is older than OS X, let alone APFS. It might be implemented using CoW now, but it certainly hasn't always been.
  - leejoramo 5y ago
    The stationary feature has existed since the “Classic” days. Probably MacOS 7. So it comes from the HFS era. It would be more accurate to say when you open a file with the Stationary flag set, a new of copy of the document is open in the default application. I don’t think a file system copy is created until you save.
    - johndoe0815 5y ago
      Stationary pads were already implemented in the Lisa UI, but it took quite some time to show up in classic MacOS - https://www.applefritter.com/node/3198 https://www.applefritter.com/node/3198
ilikepi 5y ago
macOS has had a "hidden" WiFi diagnostic tool for years. It produces real-time-ish graphs of (IIRC) three different signal strength metrics, and it also dumps the data to a file on the desktop as it's doing so. By holding down the "Option" key and clicking the WiFi icon in the menu bar, the dropdown menu will display additional information about the wireless interface, and it will also include an entry that reads "Wireless Diagnostics..." or similar.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Thank you so much for this. I think this is worthy of a separate HN post. On a related note, these hidden features are really annoying. How hard would it be to have a WiFi diags link in the WiFi dropdown? Why does Apple think that hiding things makes for a better user experience? Is it so that the people in the know get to feel like arcane knowledge masters? As it is, I have started randomly holding down option and command to see if there are hidden options. /rant Does anyone know of a site that catalogs these hidden macos options?
  - epistasis 5y ago
    I think this is a great method for reducing user interface complexity, by taking rarely useful things out of the main flow. Option-click is pretty much the only trick used for menus, and it's fairly universal across the nearly 80 years of Mac. The incidence of people that would be helped by those graphs, and the people that option-click is pretty high, so this seems like a great combination. It's similar to option-letter for inputting characters not on the keyboard (alt-code on Windows). Exposing my parents to one more menu item that will never help them, and mostly confuse them and reduce their scanning speed, well, that's really not worth it. Every option has a cost, and different people bear the weight of that cost differently. Some people like having 30 different brands of canned tomatoes to choose from at the grocery store. Others would prefer 2 or even 1, that are more carefully curated. My favorite grocer is like this. It's a tiny store, an eighth the size of a super market or less, but has a better butcher, better basic groceries, and a more extensive selection of rarer ingredients than a Safeway. It just doesn't have an entire aisle of pasta brands. That's not for everyone, but it is for me. The Mac also doesn't have to be for everyone, it for the people it fits, it fits really well.
handrous 5y ago
There are tons of excellent pieces of Apple software that come with iOS[EDIT macOS, that is] (or are free to download). Preview's simply amazing and I miss it very much on every other platform, including iOS, but probably doesn't count as a hidden gem. One that took me way too long to discover was the Digital Color Meter. It's a color picker that comes up instantly (much of what's so great about Apple's software is that they give at least half a shit about performance, unlike seemingly everyone else these days—it shouldn't be impressive that a color picker window comes up instantly from a cold start, but in the current software environment, it kinda is) and works for everything on your screen.
- jen729w 5y ago
  The built-in screen zoom is pretty neat. Hold `Ctrl` and use the vertical scroller on whatever pointing device you have to zoom in and out. Real nice when you want to take a (much) closer look at a thing without affecting layout: it zooms your viewport without affecting any of the actual content, unlike, say, increasing font size. Looks like it’s been updated, I don’t remember the different zoom type options. Maybe I just never discovered them. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210978 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210978
- blakesterz 5y ago
  Oh wow, how have I never noticed the Color Meter!? Thanks for pointing to that!
- fbcpck 5y ago
  Spotlight is also amazing, but like Preview I suppose it doesn't count as a hidden gem. Finder's column view is also excellent. I think it's the best way to navigate the filesystem through GUI; the way it displays nested directories is just super nice. It makes me wonder why other OS don't haven't copied this layout in their filesystem explorer. Grapher.app is also perhaps a hidden gem.
- sgspace 5y ago
  I used to use sip. Didn’t realize Apple made a native one. Thanks!
- 5y ago
0xFFFE 5y ago
You can create your own CA & Certificates from "Keychain Access". Quite useful.
curun1r 5y ago
I’m not sure if I’d consider it hidden, but there’s so much that can be done with the oascript utility. The idea that most GUI apps can be queried or controlled from the command line is super powerful, even if AppleScript is somewhat obtuse. As an example, I have shell aliases setup to cd into the folder(s) open in Finder or reference files selected in Finder.
microtonal 5y ago
Grapher, it is a nice program to plot functions (2D and 3D): https://twitter.com/danieldekok/status/1420093244894031874 https://twitter.com/danieldekok/status/1420093244894031874
ksbrooksjr 5y ago
This is much simpler than some of the other utilities mentioned, but I love pbcopy and pbpaste. Being able to pipe from stdout straight to the clipboard, or vice versa, is really useful.

There is also "networksetup", which allows you to do pretty much anything you want with network configuration. Useful if you want to e.g. automate VPN network switching or locations.

cromka 5y ago
> Useful if you want to e.g. automate VPN network switching or locations Can you elaborate on that a bit, please?
- knx 5y ago
  If you have a VPN named "MyVPN" you can start it from the command line with: networksetup -connectpppoeservice "MyVPN".
  - cpuguy83 5y ago
    I use this as part of an ssh ProxyCommand. It's wonderful.
exikyut 5y ago
Oh no. Oh no oh no. You don't mean Apple's implemented the Wi-Fi autoconfig functionality Ubuntu failed to deliver in ~2008, do you? Because if they have... they'll have done it... correctly. If the binary and/or supporting libraries have any references to FieldAgents in them... we're doomed. That's Skynet, right there.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Can you expand a bit? Some quick Googling didn't reveal anything useful to me -- what exactly are you talking about?
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Sure, and apologies (I think my comment went up to 2 points but now at 0, hehe). It's a reference to https://xkcd.com/416/ https://xkcd.com/416/. :P

masklinn 5y ago

“Network Link Conditioner” essentially does the opposite but it’s a really neat tool: it lets you degrade your connection, so you can test how software reacts to degraded network conditions, and don’t need to install and configure third-party proxies and the like. The biggest drawback is it affects the entire machine, you can’t enable the conditioner on a per-process basis, so it can be a bit rough on the other “normal” usage of the machine. There’s also a version on iOS.

dtaht 5y ago
Other normal traffic on the machine going through that conditioner has side effects on your application as well.
gcbirzan 5y ago
The other major drawback is that you cannot download it without an iCloud account...

mahathu 5y ago

In the file settings ("Get Info") you can set a "stationary pad" flag means whenever the file gets edited, a copy is created, and the original file doesn't change. When you're taking a screenshot of a portion of the screen you can hold the spacebar to move the rectangle around.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
Is this Copy-on-Write? Is the copy a real file or is this a filesystem implementation detail?
- OskarS 5y ago
  APFS has CoW semantics, so I would assume it uses the APFS filesystem features.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that feature is older than OS X, let alone APFS. It might be implemented using CoW now, but it certainly hasn't always been.
- leejoramo 5y ago
  The stationary feature has existed since the “Classic” days. Probably MacOS 7. So it comes from the HFS era. It would be more accurate to say when you open a file with the Stationary flag set, a new of copy of the document is open in the default application. I don’t think a file system copy is created until you save.
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    Stationary pads were already implemented in the Lisa UI, but it took quite some time to show up in classic MacOS - https://www.applefritter.com/node/3198 https://www.applefritter.com/node/3198

ilikepi 5y ago

macOS has had a "hidden" WiFi diagnostic tool for years. It produces real-time-ish graphs of (IIRC) three different signal strength metrics, and it also dumps the data to a file on the desktop as it's doing so. By holding down the "Option" key and clicking the WiFi icon in the menu bar, the dropdown menu will display additional information about the wireless interface, and it will also include an entry that reads "Wireless Diagnostics..." or similar.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
Thank you so much for this. I think this is worthy of a separate HN post. On a related note, these hidden features are really annoying. How hard would it be to have a WiFi diags link in the WiFi dropdown? Why does Apple think that hiding things makes for a better user experience? Is it so that the people in the know get to feel like arcane knowledge masters? As it is, I have started randomly holding down option and command to see if there are hidden options. /rant Does anyone know of a site that catalogs these hidden macos options?
- epistasis 5y ago
  I think this is a great method for reducing user interface complexity, by taking rarely useful things out of the main flow. Option-click is pretty much the only trick used for menus, and it's fairly universal across the nearly 80 years of Mac. The incidence of people that would be helped by those graphs, and the people that option-click is pretty high, so this seems like a great combination. It's similar to option-letter for inputting characters not on the keyboard (alt-code on Windows). Exposing my parents to one more menu item that will never help them, and mostly confuse them and reduce their scanning speed, well, that's really not worth it. Every option has a cost, and different people bear the weight of that cost differently. Some people like having 30 different brands of canned tomatoes to choose from at the grocery store. Others would prefer 2 or even 1, that are more carefully curated. My favorite grocer is like this. It's a tiny store, an eighth the size of a super market or less, but has a better butcher, better basic groceries, and a more extensive selection of rarer ingredients than a Safeway. It just doesn't have an entire aisle of pasta brands. That's not for everyone, but it is for me. The Mac also doesn't have to be for everyone, it for the people it fits, it fits really well.

handrous 5y ago

There are tons of excellent pieces of Apple software that come with iOS[EDIT macOS, that is] (or are free to download). Preview's simply amazing and I miss it very much on every other platform, including iOS, but probably doesn't count as a hidden gem. One that took me way too long to discover was the Digital Color Meter. It's a color picker that comes up instantly (much of what's so great about Apple's software is that they give at least half a shit about performance, unlike seemingly everyone else these days—it shouldn't be impressive that a color picker window comes up instantly from a cold start, but in the current software environment, it kinda is) and works for everything on your screen.

jen729w 5y ago
The built-in screen zoom is pretty neat. Hold `Ctrl` and use the vertical scroller on whatever pointing device you have to zoom in and out. Real nice when you want to take a (much) closer look at a thing without affecting layout: it zooms your viewport without affecting any of the actual content, unlike, say, increasing font size. Looks like it’s been updated, I don’t remember the different zoom type options. Maybe I just never discovered them. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210978 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210978
blakesterz 5y ago
Oh wow, how have I never noticed the Color Meter!? Thanks for pointing to that!
fbcpck 5y ago
Spotlight is also amazing, but like Preview I suppose it doesn't count as a hidden gem. Finder's column view is also excellent. I think it's the best way to navigate the filesystem through GUI; the way it displays nested directories is just super nice. It makes me wonder why other OS don't haven't copied this layout in their filesystem explorer. Grapher.app is also perhaps a hidden gem.
sgspace 5y ago
I used to use sip. Didn’t realize Apple made a native one. Thanks!
5y ago

0xFFFE 5y ago

You can create your own CA & Certificates from "Keychain Access". Quite useful.

curun1r 5y ago

I’m not sure if I’d consider it hidden, but there’s so much that can be done with the oascript utility. The idea that most GUI apps can be queried or controlled from the command line is super powerful, even if AppleScript is somewhat obtuse. As an example, I have shell aliases setup to cd into the folder(s) open in Finder or reference files selected in Finder.

microtonal 5y ago

Grapher, it is a nice program to plot functions (2D and 3D): https://twitter.com/danieldekok/status/1420093244894031874 https://twitter.com/danieldekok/status/1420093244894031874

ksbrooksjr 5y ago

This is much simpler than some of the other utilities mentioned, but I love pbcopy and pbpaste. Being able to pipe from stdout straight to the clipboard, or vice versa, is really useful.