About [this program]

To find out the version number of the program you’re using, don’t look in the Help menu. Instead, look in the application menu next to the menu—the one that bears the name of the program you’re in. That’s where you find the About command for Mac programs.

Accessibility Options control panel

The special features that let you operate the computer even with impaired vision, hearing, or motor control are called “Accessibility” in macOS. They’re in System Preferences (see Chapter 9).

Add Hardware control panel

The Mac requires no program for installing the driver for a new external gadget. The drivers for most printers, mice, keyboards, cameras, camcorders, and other accessories are preinstalled. If you plug something into the Mac and find that it doesn’t work immediately, just install the driver from the manufacturer’s website.

Add or Remove Programs control panel

Here’s another one you just don’t need on the Mac. Installing a program onto the Mac is described starting in Chapter 5. Removing a program simply involves dragging its icon to the Trash. (For a clean sweep, inspect your Home → Library → Preferences and Library → Application Support folders to see if any preference files got left behind.)

All Programs

There’s no Programs menu built into macOS, like the one on the Windows Start menu. If you’d like one, drag your Applications folder onto the end of the Dock. Now its icon is a tidy pop-up menu of every program on your machine.

Alt key

On the Mac, it’s the Option key, although the key usually says “Alt” on it, too. (In some countries, it says only “Alt.”) You can substitute Option for Alt in any keystroke in most popular programs. The Option key has a number of secondary features on the Mac, too: It hides the windows of one program when you click into another, and so on.

Automatic Update

The App Store’s automatic updates feature does exactly the same thing (Chapter 5).

Backspace key

It’s in the same place on the Mac keyboard, but it’s called Delete.

BIOS

You’ll never have to update or even think about the ROM of your Mac (the approximate equivalent of the BIOS on the PC). It’s permanent and unchanging. The very similar firmware of your Mac does occasionally have to be updated in order to work with a new version of the Mac operating system or some dramatic new feature—once every four years, perhaps. You’ll be notified on the screen when the time comes.

Calculator

The Calculator program in macOS is almost identical to the one in Windows, except that it can also perform conversions (temperature, distance, currency, and so on) and features an editable “paper tape.” It sits in your Applications folder and is described starting in “Parental tab”. (And don’t forget that you can type quick math equations into the Spotlight box.)

Camera and Scanner Wizard

When you connect a digital camera or scanner to your Mac, Photos opens and prepares to download the pictures automatically.

CDs and DVDs

In the unlikely event that you’ve outfitted your Mac with an external disc drive, you spit out the disc that’s in it by holding down the key on your Mac keyboard, or by right-clicking or two-finger clicking its desktop icon and then choosing Eject from the shortcut menu.

Character Map

This Windows program helps you find out what keys you need to press to trigger trademark symbols, copyright symbols, and other special characters. The equivalent on the Mac is called the Character Viewer (“The Character Viewer”).

Clean Install

The macOS installer can give you a fresh copy of the operating system, just as the Windows installer can. Instructions are in Appendix A.

Clipboard

The Mac’s Clipboard works much like the one in Windows. In the Finder, you can choose Edit → Show Clipboard to see whatever you most recently copied or cut.

Command line

In macOS, the command line is alive and well—but it speaks Unix, not DOS. You get to it by opening Terminal; see “Terminal”.

Control Panel

The Control Panel in macOS is called System Preferences, and you open it from your menu. As in Windows, you can view these icons either by category or in a simple alphabetical list: Just choose either Organize by Categories or Organize Alphabetically from the View menu.

Copy, Cut, Paste

When you’re editing in a word processor or graphics program, the macOS Cut, Copy, and Paste commands work exactly as they do in Windows.

At the desktop, however, there are a few differences. You can indeed copy icons and paste them into a new window using the Copy and Paste commands—but cutting them out of a window, as you can in Windows, works differently: After you’ve copied the icons from the first window, open the destination window. Then press the Option key, open the Edit menu, and choose Move Items Here.

Ctrl key

On the Mac, you generally substitute the key in keystrokes that would involve the Ctrl key in Windows. In other words, the Save command is now -S instead of Ctrl+S, Open is -O instead of Ctrl+O, and so on.

Date and Time

To set your Mac’s calendar and clock, open Date & Time in System Preferences.

Defragment and Optimize Drives

There’s no such utility included with macOS; the system auto-defragments in the background. (A defragmenting program moves around the pieces of files on your hard drive to optimize their placement and speed of opening.)

Delete key (Forward Delete)

Most desktop Mac keyboards have a forward-delete key (labeled or Del) exactly like the ones on PCs. On Mac laptops, and on Apple’s aluminum keyboards, you trigger the forward-delete function by pressing the Delete key while simultaneously pressing the fn key.

Desktop

The Mac desktop is pretty much the same idea as the Windows desktop, with a few key differences:

• You change the desktop picture using the Desktop & Screen Saver panel of System Preferences. (Or just right-click or two-finger click the desktop.)

• The Trash is an icon in the Dock, not on the desktop.

Directories

Most people call them folders on the Mac.

Disks

Working with disks is very different on the Mac. Every disk inside, or attached to, a Mac can be represented on the screen by an icon. MacOS does have something like the This PC or My Computer window (choose Go → Computer), but the icons there reflect only the disks currently inserted in your Mac. You’ll never see an icon for an empty drive, as you do in Windows, and there’s no such thing as drive letters (because the Mac refers to disks, not to drives—and calls them by name).

Mojave doesn’t display icons for disks on the desktop, as earlier Mac versions did—but you can bring them back by choosing Finder → Preferences → General and turning on the checkboxes for different kinds of disks.

Display control panel

The functions of the Windows Display control panel lurk in the macOS System Preferences program—just not all in one place. You set up your desktop picture and screen saver using the Desktop & Screen Saver pane and adjust your monitor settings using the Displays pane. (MacOS offers no equivalent to the Appearance tab in Windows, for changing the system-wide look of your computer.)

(My) Documents, (My) Music, (My) Pictures

The equivalent buckets for your everyday documents, music files, and pictures are the Documents, Music, and Pictures folders in your Home folder.

DOS prompt

There’s a command line in macOS, but it’s Unix, not DOS. For details, see “Terminal”.

Drivers

See “Add or Remove Programs control panel.”

End Task dialog box

If some Mac program is hung up or frozen, you escape it pretty much the same way you would in Windows: by forcing it to quit. To bring up the Force Quit dialog box, press Option--Esc or choose → Force Quit.

Exiting programs

You can quit a program either by choosing Quit from the menu bearing its name (next to the menu), or by right-clicking or two-finger clicking its Dock icon and then choosing Quit from the pop-up menu.

Explorer

The Mac has its own “tree” view of the files and folders on your hard drive: list view. By expanding the “flippy triangles” of your folders, you build a hierarchy that shows you as much or as little detail as you like.

If you prefer the Explorer effect of clicking a folder in one pane to see its contents in the next, try column view instead. Both views are described in Chapter 1.

Favorites

In macOS, there isn’t one single Favorites menu that lists both favorite websites and favorite icons. The Bookmarks menu of Safari lists only websites, and the Sidebar at the desktop (“Windows and How to Work Them”) lists only favorite files, folders, disks, and other icons.

File Sharing

See Chapter 13 for an in-depth look at the Mac’s networking and file-sharing system.

Folder Options

The Folder Options control panel in Windows is a collection of unrelated settings that boil down to this:

• General tab. Exactly as in Windows, it’s up to you whether or not double-clicking a folder opens up a second window—or just changes what’s in the first one. On the Mac, you make these changes using the Finder → Preferences command. There you’ll find the option called “Always open folders in a new window.”

• View tab. Most of the options here don’t exist on the Mac. For example, system files are always hidden on the Mac; you can’t opt to make them visible (at least not with the built-in controls). You can, however, choose whether you want to see the file name extensions in your desktop windows (like .doc and .html). Choose Finder → Preferences → Advanced, and turn “Show all file extensions” on or off.

• File Types tab. Just as in Windows, you can reassign certain document types so that double-clicking opens them in the program of your choice. But on the Mac, you can reassign either a whole class of files at once, as in Windows, or one file at a time. To do it, use the Get Info window, as described in “Get Info”.

• Offline files. There’s no equivalent feature on the Mac.

Fonts

The Mac and Windows PCs both use TrueType, PostScript, and OpenType fonts. (In fact, your Mac can even use the exact font files you had in Windows.) On the Mac, however, there are actually three different folders that can contain them. A complete discussion starts in “Creating PDF Files”.

Help and Support

At the desktop, choose Help → Mac Help. In other programs, the Help command is generally at the right end of your menus, exactly as in Windows.

Hibernation

On a PC, hibernation cuts all power but remembers what programs and documents you had open for a faster restart later. The Mac’s Sleep mode does that automatically when it loses power or runs out of battery; see “Standby mode.”

Internet Explorer

Microsoft’s most famous web browser doesn’t exist on the Mac—or even in Windows 10! Apple would prefer, of course, that you try Safari, its own web browser, but many a power user prefers Firefox or Chrome, which are nearly identical to the Windows versions.

Internet Options

On the Mac, you find the options for your web browser by choosing Safari → Preferences.

Java

This interpreter of tiny web page programs is alive and well in macOS. Java programs run fine in all Mac web browsers.

Keyboard control panel

You can make exactly the same kinds of settings—and more—on the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.

Logging in

The multiple-accounts feature of macOS is extremely similar to that of Windows. In each case, you can, if you wish, create a requirement to log in with a name and password before using the computer. This arrangement keeps separate the documents, email, and settings of each person who uses the computer. Chapter 12 tells all.

Mail control panel

MacOS comes with its own email program (described in Chapter 17); all of its settings are contained within the program.

Maximize button

On the Mac, clicking the Zoom button (the green in the upper-left corner of a window) does something like the Maximize button in Windows: It shoots that program into Full Screen mode, where every last pixel of screen space is put to work displaying your document (“Full Screen Button”).

Menus

On the Mac, there’s only one menu bar, always at the very top of the screen. The menus change depending on the program and the window you’re using, but the point is that the menu bar is no longer inside each window you open.

Minimize button

You can minimize a macOS window to the Dock, just the way you would minimize a Windows window to the taskbar. You do so by double-clicking its title bar, pressing -M, choosing Window → Minimize, or clicking the yellow Minimize button at the top left of a window. (Restore the window by clicking its icon in the Dock.)

Mouse control panel

The equivalent settings can be found in the Mouse panel of System Preferences.

Network Places

On the Mac, the “network neighborhood” is almost always on the screen: It’s the Sidebar, the panel at the left side of every Finder window. All the Macs and PCs on your network are always listed here, in the Shared category (unless you turned this feature off in Finder → Preferences).

Notepad

“Notes” documents the Notes app, which is far more powerful than the Notepad of old.

Personal Web Server

To find out how to turn your Mac into a state-of-the-art web server, see “POWER USERS’ CLINIC Web Sharing—and macOS Server”.

Phone and Modem Options control panel

To find the modem settings for your Mac, see the free appendix to this book, “Setting Up a Dial-Up Connection,” available on its “Missing CD” page at missingmanuals.com.

Power Options

To control when your Mac goes to sleep and (if it’s a laptop) how much power it uses, use the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences (“Color Tab”).

Printer Sharing

To share a USB inkjet printer with other Macs on the network, open the Sharing pane of System Preferences on the Mac with the printer. Turn on Printer Sharing.

To use the shared printer from across the network, open the document you want to print, choose File → Print, and choose the name of the shared printer from the first pop-up menu.

Printers and Faxes

For a list of your printers, open the Print & Scan pane of System Preferences. Faxing is no longer built into macOS.

PrntScrn key

You capture pictures of your Mac screen by pressing Shift--3 (for a full-screen grab) or Shift--4 (to grab a selected portion of the screen). There are many options available; see “Screen-Capture Keystrokes”.

Program Files folder

The Applications folder (Go → Applications) is like the Program Files folder in Windows—except that you’re not discouraged from opening it and double-clicking things. On the Mac, every program bears its true name; Microsoft Word, for example, is called Microsoft Word, not WINWORD.EXE.

Properties dialog box

You can call up something very similar for any icon (file, folder, program, disk, printer) by highlighting its icon and then choosing File → Get Info. But objects in Mac programs generally don’t contain Properties dialog boxes.

Recycle Bin

MacOS has a Trash icon at the end of the Dock. In general, it works exactly like the Windows Recycle Bin—and why not, since the Mac Trash was Microsoft’s inspiration?—but there are a couple of differences. By default, the Mac never automatically empties it, for example (see “The Trash”). That job is up to you: The simplest way is to right-click or two-finger click it, and then choose Empty Trash from the shortcut menu.

The Mac never bothers you with an “Are you sure?” message when you throw something into the Trash, either. It asks you for permission only when you choose File → Empty Trash. And you can even turn that confirmation off, if you like (in Finder → Preferences).

To put icons into the Trash, drag them there, or highlight them and then press -Delete.

Regional and Language Options control panel

The equivalent is the Language & Region panel of System Preferences.

Registry

There is no registry. Let the celebration begin!

Run command

The Mac’s command line is Terminal (“Terminal”).

Safe Mode

You can press the Shift key during startup to suppress the loading of certain software libraries, but macOS’s “safe mode” isn’t quite as massively stripped down as Windows’ Safe Mode.

ScanDisk

Just like Windows, the Mac automatically scans and, if necessary, repairs its hard drive every time your machine starts up. To run such a check on command, open Disk Utility (located in the Applications → Utilities folder), click the name of your hard drive, and then click the First Aid tab.

Scheduled Tasks

To schedule a task to take place unattended, use the launchd Unix command in Terminal (“Terminal”), or one of the scheduling programs listed at downloads.com.

Scrap files

On the Mac, they’re called clipping files, and they’re even more widely compatible. You create them the same way: Drag some highlighted text, or a graphic, out of a program’s window and onto the desktop. There it becomes an independent clipping file that you can drag back in—to the same window or a different one.

Screen Saver Gallery

The Mac’s screen savers are impressive. Open System Preferences and click the Desktop & Screen Saver icon.

Search

In macOS, you have the ultimate file-searching tool: Spotlight (Chapter 3). Get psyched!

To find websites, use the Google search box at the top of the Safari browser.

Shortcut menus

They work exactly the same as they do in Windows. You produce a shortcut menu by right-clicking—or two-finger clicking, or Control-clicking—things like icons, list items, and so on.

Shortcuts

On the Mac, they’re known as aliases. See “Aliases: Icons in Two Places at Once”.

Start menu

There’s no Start menu in macOS. Instead, you stash the icons of the programs, documents, and folders you use frequently onto the Dock at the edge of the screen, or into the Places section of the Sidebar at the left edge of every Finder window.

Exactly as with the Start menu, you can rearrange these icons (drag them horizontally) or remove the ones you don’t use often (drag them away from the Dock and then release). To add new icons of your own, just drag them into place (applications go to the left of the Dock’s divider line, documents and folders to the right).

Startup folder

To make programs launch automatically at startup, include them in the list of Login Items in the System Preferences → Accounts pane.

System control panel

The Mac has no central equivalent of the System window on a Windows PC. But its functions have analogs here:

• Version number. To find out your macOS version number and the amount of memory on your Mac, choose → About This Mac.

• Computer name. Open System Preferences, click Sharing, and edit your computer’s network name here.

• Hardware. The closest thing the Mac has to the Device Manager is System Profiler (in your Applications → Utilities folder).

• Advanced. In macOS, you can’t easily adjust your virtual memory, processor scheduling, or user profile information.

• System Restore. MacOS’s Time Machine feature is like System Restore on steroids; see “Time Machine”.

• Updates. Open App Store → Updates.

• Remote control. MacOS’s remote control is Screen Sharing, described starting in “Screen Sharing”.

Notification area

The macOS equivalent of the system tray (also called the notification area) is the row of menulets at the upper-right corner of your screen.

Taskbar

MacOS doesn’t have a taskbar, but it does have something very close: the Dock (Chapter 4). Open programs are indicated by a small dot beneath their icons in the Dock. If you hold down your cursor on one of these icons (or right-click it, or two-finger click it), you get a pop-up list of the open windows in that program, exactly as in Windows.

On the other hand, some conventions never die. Much as in Windows, you cycle through the various open Mac programs by holding down the key and pressing Tab repeatedly.

This PC or (My) Computer

The Mac’s Computer window (choose Go → Computer) is very similar, in that it shows the icons of all disks (hard drive, CD, and so on). On the other hand, it shows only the disks that are actually inserted or connected. (See “Disks.”)

“Three-fingered salute”

Instead of pressing Control-Alt-Delete to jettison a stuck program, on the Mac you press Option--Esc. A Force Quit dialog box appears. Click the program you want to toss, click Force Quit, confirm your choice, and then relaunch the program to get on with your day.

Tooltips

Small, yellow identifying balloons pop up on the Mac almost as often as they do in Windows. Just point to a toolbar icon or truncated file name without clicking. (There’s no way to turn these labels off.)

User Accounts control panel

Like every Windows operating system since Windows 2000, macOS was designed from Square One to be a multiuser operating system, keeping each person’s files, mail, and settings separate. You set up and manage these accounts in System Preferences → Users & Groups (Chapter 12).

Windows (or WINNT) folder

MacOS’s operating system resides in a folder simply called System, which sits in your main hard drive window. Exactly as in recent Windows versions, you’re forbidden to add, remove, or change anything inside. Also as in Windows, most of it is invisible anyway.

Windows logo key

The Mac has no equivalent for the key on most PC keyboards.

Windows Media Player

The Mac comes with individual programs for playing multimedia files:

• QuickTime Player (Chapter 15) to play back and record movies and sounds.

• iTunes (“iMovie”) to play CDs, internet radio, MP3 files, and other audio files.

Windows Messenger

MacOS’s instant-messaging, audioconferencing, and videoconferencing software is called Messages, and it’s described in Chapter 19.

WordPad

The TextEdit program (in the Applications folder) is a word processor along the lines of WordPad. It can even open and save Word files, as WordPad can. See “System Preferences”.

Zip files

Zip files exist on the Mac, too, and you create them almost the same way: Right-click or two-finger click a file or folder and choose Compress from the shortcut menu.