macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual

The Very Basics

To use this book, and indeed to use a Macintosh computer, you need to know a few basics. This book assumes you’re familiar with a few terms and concepts:

• Clicking. To click means to point the arrow cursor at something on the screen and then—without moving the cursor—press and release the clicker button on the mouse or trackpad. To double-click, of course, means to click twice in rapid succession, again without moving the cursor at all. And to drag means to move the cursor while holding down the mouse button.

  When you’re told to -click something, you click while pressing the key (which is next to the space bar). Shift-clicking, Option-clicking, and Control-clicking work the same way—just click while pressing the corresponding key.

  Up to Speed: Upside-Down Scrolling

  If you haven’t upgraded your Mac in a couple of years, you might discover something alarming when you try to scroll using your laptop’s trackpad: When you slide your fingers upward, the page scrolls down. That’s backward, isn’t it?

  For your entire computing career so far, you’ve always dragged the scroll bar down to move the contents of the page up—and now Apple has swapped the directions. Why would Apple throw such a monkey wrench into your life?

  The main reason is to make the Mac match the iPad, where you drag your finger up to move the page up.

  Anyway, you have two choices: You can spend a couple of days getting used to the new arrangement—or you can put things back to the way they’ve always been. To do that, open System Preferences. For a trackpad: Click Trackpad, click Scroll & Zoom, and then turn off “Scroll direction: natural.” For a Magic Mouse: Click Mouse, click Point & Click, and then turn off “Scroll direction: natural.”

  Note: If you have a non-Apple mouse that has a scroll wheel, then the Mouse pane may not offer this scroll-direction option. You can still reverse the scroll-direction logic, though, if you’re handy in Terminal (macOS’s command-line program).

  Just open Terminal and type defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false. When you press Return and log out, you’ll find that the time-honored scroll directions have been restored.

  (There’s also right-clicking. That very important topic is described in depth in Notes on Right-Clicking.)

• Menus. The menus are the words at the top of your screen: , File, Edit, and so on. Click one to make a list of commands appear.

  Some people click once to open a menu and then, after reading the choices, click again on the one they want. Other people like to press the mouse button continuously after the initial click on the menu title, drag down the list to the desired command, and only then release the mouse button. Either method works fine.

• Keyboard shortcuts. If you’re typing along in a burst of creative energy, it’s disruptive to have to grab the mouse to use a menu. That’s why many Mac fans prefer to trigger menu commands by pressing key combinations. For example, in word processors, you can press -B to produce a boldface word. When you read an instruction like “Press -B,” start by pressing the key, and then, while it’s down, type the letter B, and finally release both keys.

  Tip

  You know what’s really nice? The keystroke to open the Preferences dialog box in every Apple program—Mail, Safari, iMovie, Photos, TextEdit, Preview, and on and on—is always the same: -comma. Better yet, that standard is catching on in other apps, too, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

• Gestures. A gesture is a swipe across your trackpad (on your laptop, or on an external Apple trackpad) or across the top surface of the Apple Magic Mouse. Gestures have been given huge importance in macOS. Dialog Boxes contains a handy list of them.

• Dialog boxes. See Figure 1-2 for a tour of the onscreen elements you’ll frequently be asked to use, like checkboxes, radio buttons, tabs, and so on.

  

  Pressing Return is usually the same as clicking the default button—the lower-right button that almost always means “OK, I’m done here.”

  Figure 1-2. Knowing what you’re doing on the Mac often requires knowing what things are called. Here are some of the most common onscreen elements. They include checkboxes (turn on as many as you like) and radio buttons (only one can be turned on in each grouping).

• Icons. The colorful inch-tall pictures that appear in your various desktop folders are the graphic symbols that represent each program, disk, and document on your computer. If you click an icon one time, it darkens, indicating that you’ve just highlighted or selected it. Now you’re ready to manipulate it by using, for example, a menu command.

A few more tips on using the Mac keyboard appear at the beginning of Chapter 7. Otherwise, if you’ve mastered this much information, then you have all the technical background you need to enjoy macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual.