**Customizing Your New Mac OS Install**

The first step in customizing your new Mac OS install is to explore the various features and options that are available. One feature that I find essential is the ability to take a screenshot of the current screen. To do this, simply type `default space right space kappa dot screen capture space disabled - shadow space - bool space true` and press return. Next, take a screenshot of the window by pressing the command key and the shift key at the same time. Now, compare the two screenshots together. The one with the shadow on the left was taken before enabling this feature, while the other is a screenshot after it has been enabled.

For me, hot corners are an absolute must-have in Mac OS. They allow you to execute shortcuts at all four corners of your display by simply dragging your mouse to that portion of the screen. To enable hot corners, go into System Preferences and select Mission Control from the left-hand menu. Click on "Hot Corners" in the bottom-left corner of the window. You will see four hot corners available - one for each direction. Configure these to your liking by clicking on each corner and selecting a shortcut to run.

For example, I like to have desktop and Launchpad enabled at the bottom left-hand corner, Mission Control in the upper left-hand corner, and "Input Display Sleep" enabled at the bottom right-hand corner. Once you've configured your hot corners, click "OK" to save them. Now, drag your mouse to the bottom left-hand corner to invoke the desktop view, or to the upper left-hand corner to invoke Launchpad.

Another feature that I find essential is the ability to tab between all controls using the tab key on your keyboard. By default, Mac OS does not allow you to do this, but it can be easily enabled. To do so, go into System Preferences and select Keyboard from the left-hand menu. Click on "Shortcuts" in the bottom-right corner of the window. At the bottom of the window, click on the box next to "All Controls". Now, when you press tab, you will be able to navigate through all controls on screen.

I also like to customize the Finder sidebar to my liking. To do this, go into System Preferences and select Finder from the left-hand menu. Click on "General" in the bottom-left corner of the window. You can see how the Finder looks by default, with tags and a few favorites enabled. I like to drag certain items out of the sidebar to get rid of them, or enable some user folders directly within the sidebar. For example, I have enabled April movies music pictures and my base folder in the sidebar.

I also like to uncheck "Recent Items" because I don't normally use tags in my workflow. Another feature that is available in Mac OS is called Stacks, which was introduced in Mohave. This allows you to group similar items together on your desktop, making it easier to access and navigate through them. To enable stacks, simply right-click on your desktop and select "Stacks". You can then customize the grouping of your stacks by right-clicking and selecting "Group Stacks By".

Finally, I like to explore other features and options available in Mac OS. There are many ways to customize your workflow and make your computing experience more efficient. By experimenting with different settings and features, you can create a system that is tailored to your specific needs and preferences.

**About the Author**

Jeff with 905 Mac is an expert in Mac OS customization and workflow optimization. With years of experience using Macs, Jeff has developed a range of techniques for getting the most out of Apple's operating system. In this article, he shares his favorite tips and tricks for customizing your new Mac OS install.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video we're gonna talk about several getting started tips for new Mac OS installs and you definitely don't want to miss this if you're a new Mac user thanks for watching nine-to-five Mac be sure to thumbs up click the subscribe button and then enable notifications with the bill icon so you won't miss any upcoming videos the first tip is to adjust tracking speed now this should go without saying but if your new Mac user you may not realize that your tracking speed is actually really slow by default like it takes several swipes to get to the other side of the screen on your trackpad and it's just not as efficient so speeding up the tracking is always the very first thing I do on a new Mac OS install we want to open up system preferences and then click on trackpad there you'll see tracking speed now you don't have to adjust it all the way to the right but you definitely want to make it faster than the default setting as you can see I can move my cursor much more efficiently now and don't forget mouse and trackpad settings are separate so you have to go into the mouse section of preferences in order to adjust the tracking speed if for instance you're using a Magic Mouse and speaking of mice if that is your preferred way to control the interface you want to make sure you enable right click in the Preferences now even in 2019 right click is not enabled by default in Mac OS so you're going to need to go into system preferences go to Mouse and then choose secondary click just make sure you check that and by default it's set to click on the right side so that will enable your secondary click which lends you more options at the click of a mouse button which again makes you more efficient in Mac OS another thing that I recommend you do on a new Mac OS install is to alter your dock don't leave it as default because a lot of times there's apps there that you simply have no no interest in using there and there are apps that aren't in the dock that you want to use frequently so what I like to do is I like to do simply drag and release like that to remove applications you can also right-click go to options and select remove from dock so either way you want to do it it doesn't matter the point is you want to customize your dock by room moving applications that she probably won't use that frequently so in this case I'm gonna remove Siri as well because I'm never gonna invoke Siri from the dock I'm gonna remove reminders as well because I don't use the reminders app photos news I don't use any of those so I'm cleaning up my dock to make it a little more simple and then of course I can go and add applications to the dock that I know I'm going to use frequently so you can see I have Final Cut Pro and affinity photo running here so I just want to right-click and select keep in dock in the options section and that will keep Final Cut Pro in the dock or I can simply drag an application in the dock like that and it will automatically enable keep in dock so even when you quit the application the app stays in the dock for easy access now let's talk about customizing the dock a bit one of the things that you'll notice is that when you minimize an application that minimized app appears on the right side of the dock just like that now the problem with that well it's not really a problem but the issue that can occur is that if you have a lot of applications and minimize you can start to fill up your dock and it could just make things seem a little cluttered so here you can see I have about five different applications there that make the dock even wider than it would have been otherwise because there's additional items in the dock so to remedy this we can go into system preferences and then go to the dock section and then enable minimize windows into application icon so when we check that this is going to make it so that when we minimize an application like this it minimizes notice it minimizes into the dock icon itself instead of appearing on the side now the downside of that is that you don't get a preview of the running application but the advantage is that it keeps your dock nice and clean so you'll have to decide whether or not you like that personally I do but I can also understand preferring the default method now although you can control volume via something like the touch bar for instance or the shortcut keys on your MacBook Pro I definitely reckon adding the volume indicator or the volume controls to your menu bar so I'm gonna show you how to do that just open up System Preferences click on sound and then click where it says show volume in menu bar now this is great because not only does it allow you to control the volume but it also allows you to adjust your output device on the fly and not only that if you hold the option key and click the volume you can adjust your output or input device right there on the fly right from the menu bar so that's a much more efficient way to adjust your volume settings now one of the most annoying things for me in Mac OS Mohave is when I take a screenshot for instance use command shift 3 to take a screenshot like that it puts a little floating thumbnail there for a few seconds before that times out and then it appears on your desktop like normal now the point of that floating thumbnail is to allow you to open it up to use markup in preview things like that but to be honest it can slow you down especially if you're used to working with screenshots if you have a workflow down here's what you can do to fix that press command shift 5 on your keyboard to invoke the screenshot interface and then click the options button and select show floating thumbnail basically you want to uncheck that and so that will disable the floating thumbnail and when you take a screenshot going forward it will just immediately appear as you can see right there on the desktop ready to take action so in other words no more floating thumbnail to deal with it works just like it did pre Mojave in your screenshots appear immediately on your desktop ready to take action now speaking of screenshots one thing that I definitely like to do is to disable the shadow that appears when taking screenshots of a window using command shift 4 and then pressing the spacebar and then clicking the to take a screenshot like this so basically I'm taking a screenshot of System Preferences but by default notice what happens here it places a shadow around the screenshot and although that looks nice I don't particularly like it when I'm uploading these images to 9 Matt for instance for publishing I like to keep my screenshots nice and simple so I like to eliminate that shadow let me show you how to do that right here just open the terminal window you can open up Launchpad and go to other then click on terminal and they'll just type the following default space right space kappa dot screen capture space disabled - shadow space - bool space true and then press return and then type in kill all space system UI server enter and that's it so now but I take that screenshot again take the screenshot of the window and notice no shadow so let's compare the two screenshots together the one with the shadow on the left and the shadowless one on the right for my workflow enabling hot corners is just an absolute must in Mac OS I cannot use a Mac without hot corners what hot corners basically allow you to do is to execute shortcuts at all four corners of your display by just simply dragging your mouse to that portion of the screen so what we need to do here is go into system preferences open Mission Control and then click where it says hot corners in the bottom left-hand corner so guess what you have four hot corners because there are four corners only display so what you want to do here is just basically go in and configure this to your liking here's how I like to set it up I like to have desktop and a bottom left-hand corner Launchpad in the upper left-hand corner Mission Control in the upper right input display to sleep in the lower right all right so we're finished let's click OK and let's start using these hot corners let me show you why this is so cool so drag my mouse to the bottom left-hand corner it invokes the desktop view so I can access whatever is on that desktop no matter how many windows I have displayed on the screen upper left-hand corner invokes Launchpad upper right invokes Mission Control I can add a new desktop or access my other desktops bottom right puts my display to sleep and you're doing all this without touching the keyboard so bottom left hand corner shows the desktop moves all the other windows out of the way and I can interface with whatever is on that desktop with these hot corners are must-have in my here's another thing you definitely want to enable on Mac OS the ability to tab between all controls using the tab key on your keyboard now by default Mac OS doesn't let you tap between all controls so if I'm hitting tab right now and nothing's happening it's just staying in that little search box so it's not jumping down to the other controls to fix that you need to go into system preferences keyboard click shortcuts and then at the bottom you see where it says all controls just click that and now guess what folks we can tap between all controls on screen so here I'm going to go back to dock and what a press tab now notice how I'm tabbing between all those different controls that is the power of that option and it is a absolute must do in my opinion if you like to use your keyboard to control things on screen so highly recommend enabling this option on new Mac OS installs I'm also a big believer in customizing the Finder sidebar to your liking so what I like to do here is I like to go well first of all you can see how finder looks by default so you have your tags you have just a few favorites I like to drag certain things right out of the Finder sidebar like that to get rid of them but I also like to go into preferences and enable some of the user folders directly in the sidebar so for instance in April movies music pictures and even your your base folder so you can see right there I know I say folder weird go ahead and make fun of it alright so I also like to uncheck recent tax because I don't use tags normally in my workflow so that's just a couple of ways you can customize the Finder sidebar to your liking my advice isn't to necessarily copy exactly what I've done here but just make it work for your particular workflow and the last thing we'll talk about here is enabling stacks tax first appeared in Mac OS Mohave and this is a really great feature for keeping your desktop nice and tidy so here in this example you can see my desktop is anything but but if I right click and select you stacks look what happens it basically sorts everything in their own little folders so if you click one of those stacks it expands it and you can access all the items within with ease another really cool thing about stacks is that if you swipe on it like that you can actually scroll through and screw up through all the items in a stack that's really cool so I'm scrolling through screenshots so by default it groups your stacks by kind but you can customize that even further by right-clicking and selecting group stacks by and remember you need Mac OS Mohave in order to take advantage of stacks so ladies and gentlemen that has been a look at over 10 ways that I like to personally customize my new Mac OS install what's your favorite tip do you have any additional things that you like to do please let me know down below in the comment section this is Jeff with 905 Mac youin this video we're gonna talk about several getting started tips for new Mac OS installs and you definitely don't want to miss this if you're a new Mac user thanks for watching nine-to-five Mac be sure to thumbs up click the subscribe button and then enable notifications with the bill icon so you won't miss any upcoming videos the first tip is to adjust tracking speed now this should go without saying but if your new Mac user you may not realize that your tracking speed is actually really slow by default like it takes several swipes to get to the other side of the screen on your trackpad and it's just not as efficient so speeding up the tracking is always the very first thing I do on a new Mac OS install we want to open up system preferences and then click on trackpad there you'll see tracking speed now you don't have to adjust it all the way to the right but you definitely want to make it faster than the default setting as you can see I can move my cursor much more efficiently now and don't forget mouse and trackpad settings are separate so you have to go into the mouse section of preferences in order to adjust the tracking speed if for instance you're using a Magic Mouse and speaking of mice if that is your preferred way to control the interface you want to make sure you enable right click in the Preferences now even in 2019 right click is not enabled by default in Mac OS so you're going to need to go into system preferences go to Mouse and then choose secondary click just make sure you check that and by default it's set to click on the right side so that will enable your secondary click which lends you more options at the click of a mouse button which again makes you more efficient in Mac OS another thing that I recommend you do on a new Mac OS install is to alter your dock don't leave it as default because a lot of times there's apps there that you simply have no no interest in using there and there are apps that aren't in the dock that you want to use frequently so what I like to do is I like to do simply drag and release like that to remove applications you can also right-click go to options and select remove from dock so either way you want to do it it doesn't matter the point is you want to customize your dock by room moving applications that she probably won't use that frequently so in this case I'm gonna remove Siri as well because I'm never gonna invoke Siri from the dock I'm gonna remove reminders as well because I don't use the reminders app photos news I don't use any of those so I'm cleaning up my dock to make it a little more simple and then of course I can go and add applications to the dock that I know I'm going to use frequently so you can see I have Final Cut Pro and affinity photo running here so I just want to right-click and select keep in dock in the options section and that will keep Final Cut Pro in the dock or I can simply drag an application in the dock like that and it will automatically enable keep in dock so even when you quit the application the app stays in the dock for easy access now let's talk about customizing the dock a bit one of the things that you'll notice is that when you minimize an application that minimized app appears on the right side of the dock just like that now the problem with that well it's not really a problem but the issue that can occur is that if you have a lot of applications and minimize you can start to fill up your dock and it could just make things seem a little cluttered so here you can see I have about five different applications there that make the dock even wider than it would have been otherwise because there's additional items in the dock so to remedy this we can go into system preferences and then go to the dock section and then enable minimize windows into application icon so when we check that this is going to make it so that when we minimize an application like this it minimizes notice it minimizes into the dock icon itself instead of appearing on the side now the downside of that is that you don't get a preview of the running application but the advantage is that it keeps your dock nice and clean so you'll have to decide whether or not you like that personally I do but I can also understand preferring the default method now although you can control volume via something like the touch bar for instance or the shortcut keys on your MacBook Pro I definitely reckon adding the volume indicator or the volume controls to your menu bar so I'm gonna show you how to do that just open up System Preferences click on sound and then click where it says show volume in menu bar now this is great because not only does it allow you to control the volume but it also allows you to adjust your output device on the fly and not only that if you hold the option key and click the volume you can adjust your output or input device right there on the fly right from the menu bar so that's a much more efficient way to adjust your volume settings now one of the most annoying things for me in Mac OS Mohave is when I take a screenshot for instance use command shift 3 to take a screenshot like that it puts a little floating thumbnail there for a few seconds before that times out and then it appears on your desktop like normal now the point of that floating thumbnail is to allow you to open it up to use markup in preview things like that but to be honest it can slow you down especially if you're used to working with screenshots if you have a workflow down here's what you can do to fix that press command shift 5 on your keyboard to invoke the screenshot interface and then click the options button and select show floating thumbnail basically you want to uncheck that and so that will disable the floating thumbnail and when you take a screenshot going forward it will just immediately appear as you can see right there on the desktop ready to take action so in other words no more floating thumbnail to deal with it works just like it did pre Mojave in your screenshots appear immediately on your desktop ready to take action now speaking of screenshots one thing that I definitely like to do is to disable the shadow that appears when taking screenshots of a window using command shift 4 and then pressing the spacebar and then clicking the to take a screenshot like this so basically I'm taking a screenshot of System Preferences but by default notice what happens here it places a shadow around the screenshot and although that looks nice I don't particularly like it when I'm uploading these images to 9 Matt for instance for publishing I like to keep my screenshots nice and simple so I like to eliminate that shadow let me show you how to do that right here just open the terminal window you can open up Launchpad and go to other then click on terminal and they'll just type the following default space right space kappa dot screen capture space disabled - shadow space - bool space true and then press return and then type in kill all space system UI server enter and that's it so now but I take that screenshot again take the screenshot of the window and notice no shadow so let's compare the two screenshots together the one with the shadow on the left and the shadowless one on the right for my workflow enabling hot corners is just an absolute must in Mac OS I cannot use a Mac without hot corners what hot corners basically allow you to do is to execute shortcuts at all four corners of your display by just simply dragging your mouse to that portion of the screen so what we need to do here is go into system preferences open Mission Control and then click where it says hot corners in the bottom left-hand corner so guess what you have four hot corners because there are four corners only display so what you want to do here is just basically go in and configure this to your liking here's how I like to set it up I like to have desktop and a bottom left-hand corner Launchpad in the upper left-hand corner Mission Control in the upper right input display to sleep in the lower right all right so we're finished let's click OK and let's start using these hot corners let me show you why this is so cool so drag my mouse to the bottom left-hand corner it invokes the desktop view so I can access whatever is on that desktop no matter how many windows I have displayed on the screen upper left-hand corner invokes Launchpad upper right invokes Mission Control I can add a new desktop or access my other desktops bottom right puts my display to sleep and you're doing all this without touching the keyboard so bottom left hand corner shows the desktop moves all the other windows out of the way and I can interface with whatever is on that desktop with these hot corners are must-have in my here's another thing you definitely want to enable on Mac OS the ability to tab between all controls using the tab key on your keyboard now by default Mac OS doesn't let you tap between all controls so if I'm hitting tab right now and nothing's happening it's just staying in that little search box so it's not jumping down to the other controls to fix that you need to go into system preferences keyboard click shortcuts and then at the bottom you see where it says all controls just click that and now guess what folks we can tap between all controls on screen so here I'm going to go back to dock and what a press tab now notice how I'm tabbing between all those different controls that is the power of that option and it is a absolute must do in my opinion if you like to use your keyboard to control things on screen so highly recommend enabling this option on new Mac OS installs I'm also a big believer in customizing the Finder sidebar to your liking so what I like to do here is I like to go well first of all you can see how finder looks by default so you have your tags you have just a few favorites I like to drag certain things right out of the Finder sidebar like that to get rid of them but I also like to go into preferences and enable some of the user folders directly in the sidebar so for instance in April movies music pictures and even your your base folder so you can see right there I know I say folder weird go ahead and make fun of it alright so I also like to uncheck recent tax because I don't use tags normally in my workflow so that's just a couple of ways you can customize the Finder sidebar to your liking my advice isn't to necessarily copy exactly what I've done here but just make it work for your particular workflow and the last thing we'll talk about here is enabling stacks tax first appeared in Mac OS Mohave and this is a really great feature for keeping your desktop nice and tidy so here in this example you can see my desktop is anything but but if I right click and select you stacks look what happens it basically sorts everything in their own little folders so if you click one of those stacks it expands it and you can access all the items within with ease another really cool thing about stacks is that if you swipe on it like that you can actually scroll through and screw up through all the items in a stack that's really cool so I'm scrolling through screenshots so by default it groups your stacks by kind but you can customize that even further by right-clicking and selecting group stacks by and remember you need Mac OS Mohave in order to take advantage of stacks so ladies and gentlemen that has been a look at over 10 ways that I like to personally customize my new Mac OS install what's your favorite tip do you have any additional things that you like to do please let me know down below in the comment section this is Jeff with 905 Mac you\n"