The Complicated Story of the Function Keys

As the previous section makes clear, the F-keys at the top of modern Mac keyboards come with predefined functions: brightness, volume, music playback, and so on.

But they didn’t always. Before Apple gave F9, F10, and F11 to the fast-forward and speaker-volume functions, those keys controlled the Exposé window-management function described starting in Figure 2-2.

So the question is: What if you don’t want to trigger the hardware features of these keys? What if you want pressing F1 to mean “F1” (which opens the Help window in some programs)? What if you want F9, F10, and F11 to control Exposé’s three modes, as they once did?

For that purpose, you’re supposed to press the fn key. The fn key (lower left on small keyboards, center block of keys on the big ones) switches the function of the function keys. In other words, pressing fn and F10 triggers an Exposé feature, even though the key has a Mute symbol () painted on it.

But here’s the thing: What if you use those F-keys for software features (like Cut, Copy, Paste, and Exposé) more often than the hardware features (like brightness and volume)?

In that case, you can reverse the logic, so that pressing the F-keys alone triggers software functions and governs brightness and audio only when you’re pressing fn. To do that, choose → System Preferences→Keyboard. Turn on the cryptically worded checkbox “Use F1, F2, etc. as standard function keys.”

And that’s it. From now on, you press the fn key to get the functions painted on the keys (, , , , , , , , and so on).

The Fingerprint Sensor

The power button—the rightmost Touch Bar button—is also a Touch ID fingerprint reader. It’s the same sensor that’s on the iPhone and iPad. Once you’ve taught the Mac to recognize your fingerprint in System Preferences→Touch ID, then just resting your finger on this button is enough to unlock the Mac, bypassing the password screen.

In fact, if you’ve set up your Mac with different accounts, the next person can insta-switch to his account just by clicking the Touch ID sensor himself—no logging out, no menu commands, no other steps.

Finally, you can use your fingerprint to approve App Store purchases with a single touch, or to buy stuff on the web without having to enter your name, address, and credit card info over and over again. That part’s called Apple Pay on the Web, and it’s described in “Back to My Mac”.

The Control Strip

Some Touch Bar buttons are always present. At the left end, for example, what Apple calls a System button is always available. Usually, it’s the Esc key, so that you’re always one tap away from being able to close a menu or dialog box from the keyboard (“Reassigning all documents of one type”). Sometimes the System button says Done or , but you get the idea.

At the right end, Apple offers something called the Control Strip. You’re probably too young to remember the Control Strip (in System 7, which ran Macs from 1991 to 1998). But this is the same idea: a collapsible row of buttons that give you direct access to settings you’re likely to want to change without burrowing into System Preferences.

Out of the box, the Control Strip seeks to restore the most essential functions of the F-keys that the Touch Bar replaces: screen brightness and speaker volume (plus a button for Siri), as shown at top in Figure 7-3.

When the Control Strip is collapsed, you have two ways to adjust the brightness and volume:

• Tap the or button. A slider springs out to the left of the button. Touch or drag your finger inside the slider to adjust the brightness or volume.

• Slide from the or button. In other words, you can adjust the brightness or volume with one continuous finger move instead of two—just keep your finger down after the initial tap, and drag within the slider (Figure 7-3, bottom).

Now, not everybody likes change. And some people don’t like the way Apple makes changes. Fortunately, the Control Strip is a change you can change.

• Bring back the function keys temporarily. If you need the standard full-row set of Mac function keys as described in “Desktop Exposé” and “The Complicated Story of the Function Keys”, you can bring them back. Tap the thin button to the left of the button. The collapsed Control Strip now expands to stretch the full length of the keyboard, precisely replicating the function keys that used to be painted on the top row of physical keys (Figure 7-3, second from top).

• Bring back the function keys permanently. If you prefer to have the standard function keys at all times, open System Preferences→Keyboard. From the “Touch Bar shows” pop-up menu, choose Expanded Control Strip. At this point, the Touch Bar never changes, never shows you app-specific buttons; it always shows the traditional function keys, pictured second from top in Figure 7-3.

  

  Figure 7-3. Top: The Control Strip is always present on the right—and usually collapsed, to make room for your programs’ buttons in the center of the Touch Bar. To expand the Control Strip to the full width of the keyboard, tap the skinny button.
  Bottom: The Brightness and Volume buttons transform into sliders when you hold your finger down on them.

• Get rid of the Control Strip. On the other hand, maybe you don’t adjust your brightness or volume much, or you have another way to do it. And you’d rather have the entire width of the Touch Bar dedicated to app-specific buttons.

  In that case, open System Preferences→Keyboard. From the “Touch Bar shows” pop-up menu, choose App Controls. Now the Control Strip is always hidden; you’ve got a lot more space available for function buttons within each program.

• Change the buttons on the Control Strip. Apple’s probably correct that the functions most people want most of the time are Brightness, Volume, and Mute. (Siri? Well, maybe in time.) But that doesn’t mean you can’t add or delete buttons from the collapsed Control Strip if there are other functions you use more often. In fact, you can even customize the expanded Control Strip (Figure 7-3, second from top).

  The key to making these changes: Open System Preferences→Keyboard; click Customize Control Strip. Now you’ve opened the weird, wonderful world of Touch Bar customizing, as described in the next section. Note that, in this case, you can expand or collapse the Control Strip during this process, thereby editing either version. For example, you could get rid of the Siri button (there are, after all, other ways to trigger Siri), which makes more room for app-specific buttons. Or maybe you never use the Launcher button in the expanded Control Strip; this is your chance to replace it with, for example, the Screenshot button or the Show Desktop button.

Customizing the Touch Bar

The key to choosing which buttons you want on your Touch Bar is the View→Customize Touch Bar command. You’ll find that command in the Finder, Mail, Photos, and a few other major programs. (If the program you’re using doesn’t let you customize its Touch Bar, then that command doesn’t appear.)

The dialog box shown in Figure 7-4 shows what you’d see in the Finder.

Figure 7-4. When the Customize dialog box is on the screen, you can move, delete, or add buttons on the Touch Bar. All the existing buttons begin gently wiggling to indicate that they’re movable or deletable.

Editing your Touch Bar is a strange, delightful procedure. It goes like this:

• Install a new button. Inspect the palette of available Touch Bar buttons on your Mac’s main screen. You can drag one of those buttons downward with your mouse, down off the screen, “through” the laptop’s hinge, and onto the Touch Bar.

  If you drag onto a blank spot (anywhere marked by ---- dashes), you can drop it there to install it. If you drag it onto an existing button, then a dotted outline appears; that means that you’ll replace the existing button when you let go.

• Rearrange existing buttons. Once the Customize dialog box is open, you can use your finger to drag the existing Touch Bar buttons into a new order.

• Delete a button. Once the Customize dialog box is open, use your finger to drag the unwanted button all the way to the left; release it on top of the Trash icon that appears there.

In each case, hit Done (either at the far left of the Touch Bar, or on your main screen) to wrap it up.

QuickType on the Touch Bar

On a phone, what Apple calls its QuickType keyboard can save you a lot of time, tapping, and errors. As you type a sentence, the software predicts which word you might type next—the three most likely words—and displays them as three buttons above the keyboard. (See Figure 7-5.)

Figure 7-5. QuickType is autocomplete on steroids. Frankly, it’s a rush when it finishes a long word for you.

If you begin the sentence by typing, “I really,” then the three suggestions might be want, don’t, and like.

But what if you intended to say, “I really hope…”? In that case, type the first letter of “hope.” Instantly, the three suggestions change to “h,” hope, and hate. (The first button always shows, in quotes, whatever non-word you’ve typed so far, just in case that’s what you really intend. To place it into your text, you can tap that button or tap the space bar or some punctuation.)

When someone texts you a question that ends with a choice (“Coffee, tea, or me?”), the QuickType buttons cleverly offer those same choices. Before you’ve even typed a single letter, the choices say “coffee,” “tea,” and “you.”

QuickType automatically adds a space after each word you select, so you don’t have to mess with the space bar. And, sometimes, QuickType offers you several words on a single button, to save you even more time (for example, “up to” or “in the”).

Thanks to the Touch Bar, the QuickType suggestions are now on your Mac, too. They’re available in any Touch Bar–enabled program where you can type, like Mail, Notes, and TextEdit. (If you don’t see the suggestions, they may currently be collapsed. Tap the button to bring them up.)

Of course, on the Mac, you have a real keyboard; you’re not trying to hit keys the size of Tic Tacs on a glass screen. And QuickType means you have to split your focus; you have to pay attention to both the words you’re tapping and the text on the main screen.

You could argue, therefore, that QuickType is less important on the Mac than on the iPhone. It might be useful if you’re unsure of a word’s spelling, or if you’re a very slow typist—but if you can type fairly quickly, it’s usually faster to just use the keyboard.

In that case, you may want to turn off the QuickType feature entirely, or maybe only for one program.

The key is the “Show typing suggestions” checkbox on the Customize Touch Bar screen (Figure 7-4). If you turn it off (for the program whose Touch Bar you’re editing), then the QuickType suggestions no longer appear. There’s that much more space for your app-specific function buttons.

The Spelling and Grammar Checker

Your Mac can give you live, interactive spelling and grammar checking, just as in Microsoft Word and other word processors. That is, misspelled words or badly written sentences or fragments get flagged with a dashed red underline (for grammar problems, a green underline) the moment you type them. Here’s the crash course:

• Check the spelling of one word: Highlight the word. Choose Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Show Spelling and Grammar. The spell-check dialog box opens, with the proposed corrections visible.

• Check spelling as you type. Choose Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Check Spelling While Typing. (If Check Grammar With Spelling is turned on in the same submenu, you’ll get a grammar check, too.)

  Now, as you type, you’ll see those red and green underlines on words the Mac thinks represent spelling or grammar mistakes. To fix one, right-click or two-finger click the underlined word, and proceed as shown in Figure 7-8.

Figure 7-8. Top: You’re never more than a right-click or two-finger click away from more accurate spelling. Once you right-click a questionable word, the suggestions of Apple’s built-in dictionary appear right in the shortcut menu, along with the Ignore Spelling and Learn Spelling commands.
Bottom: If you’ve opted for autocorrected spelling, you get the little iPhoney suggestion bubble when you pause after typing a word. Ignore it to accept the suggestion; click the × in the bubble to keep what you typed.

• Check spelling after the document is finished. Choose Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Show Spelling and Grammar (or press -:). The Spelling dialog box appears. The first error it spots appears in the top box, with the proposed corrections in the bottom one.

  If you like one of Apple’s proposals, then click it and click Change. If the word was correct already (for example, the guy’s last name really is Teh), then click Find Next (“Leave the word as I typed it”), Ignore (“It’s OK everywhere in this document”), or Learn (“Never flag this word again”).

  Handily enough, you can also click Define to look up a highlighted word (one of the spelling suggestions, for example) in the Mac’s built-in Dictionary app. Also handily enough, the spelling checker maintains dictionaries for 15 languages. It’s often smart enough to recognize, within a single document, which language you’re using—but specifying the language in System Preferences→Keyboard→Text→Spelling is generally more reliable.

• Fix spelling as you type. Note the difference. Checking your spelling just means “finding the misspelled words.” Fixing means autocorrecting the errors as they occur, as you type. You might not even notice that it’s happening!

  This most tantalizing option is found in Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Correct Spelling Automatically. And sure enough, when this option is turned on, common typos like teh and frmo and dont get fixed as you type; you don’t have to do anything to make it happen.

It’s not perfect. It doesn’t correct all errors (or even most of them). It occasionally even corrects a word you didn’t mean to have corrected. (When it makes a mistake, hit -Z, the Undo command, to restore what you typed.) And sometimes it doesn’t make the change until you’re halfway through the sentence.

Still, though. Kind of cool.

Text Substitution (Abbreviation Expansion)

This useful feature autoreplaces one thing you type with something else. Why? Because it can do any of these things.

Replace abbreviations with much longer phrases

You can program addr to type your entire return address. Create two-letter abbreviations for big legal or technical words you have to type a lot. Set up goaway to type out a polite rejection letter for use in email. And so on.

This feature has been in Microsoft Office forever (called AutoCorrect), and it’s always been available as a shareware add-on (TypeIt4Me and TextExpander, for example). But now it’s built right into most Apple programs, plus any others that use Apple’s text-input plumbing.

You build your list of abbreviations in the System Preferences→Keyboard→Text tab, shown in Figure 7-9. See the list at left? Click the + to create a new row in the scrolling table of substitutions.

Figure 7-9. This is where you can manage macOS’s typographic substitutions. (They’re in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences—not Language & Region anymore.)
You can add all kinds of auto–typo corrections and even boilerplate text paragraphs.

Click in the left column and type the abbreviation you want (for example, addr). Click in the right column and type, or paste, the text you want macOS to type instead.

Tip

Don’t be shy—you’re not limited to short snippets. The replacement text can be pages long, which is handy if you’re a lawyer and you build your contracts out of boilerplate chunks of canned text.

You can even create multiple paragraphs—but not by hitting Return when you want a new line; no, hitting Return means “I’m finished entering this text” and closes up the box. Instead, press Option-Return when you want a paragraph break.

That’s it! Now, whenever you type one of the abbreviations you’ve set up, the Mac instantly replaces it with your substituted text.

And not just the Mac, either; your abbreviations autosync to iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, and other Macs. If, that is, you’ve turned on System Preferences→iCloud→iCloud Drive. (Remember, you can turn off the text-replacement feature in individual programs, if you like—TextEdit, Mail, Stickies, and so on. To do that, choose Edit→Substitutions→Text Replacement, so that the checkmark disappears.)

Auto-Periods, Auto-Caps

On the iPhone, the software comes to your rescue every time you reach the end of a sentence. All you have to do is tap the space bar twice. The phone automatically gives you a period and a space and capitalizes the first letter of the next sentence.

Believe it or not, those features have now made their way into macOS. In System Preferences→Keyboard→Text, you can now turn on these options:

• Capitalize words automatically. You can give your Shift keys a break. From now on, the Mac can capitalize proper nouns (Ohio, Texas, Pepsi, Bible, Empire State, American Express) and the first words of sentences for you. Just type away, and marvel as those lowercase letters become capitals an instant after you’ve typed them.

• Add period with double-space. Truth is, there’s not much point to this feature on the Mac. On an iPhone, it’s a godsend because it saves you from having to swap onscreen keyboard layouts every time you want a period. On the Mac, the period key is always there! Still, for the sake of consistency, here it is: the “type two spaces to get a period” option.

Screamingly important note: Sadly, these features don’t work in all programs. They have an effect in Apple’s apps (Mail, TextEdit, Pages, Notes, and so on), but not in Microsoft or Adobe apps.

Case Swapping

The final feature in macOS’s text-massaging tool chest is case swapping—that is, changing text you’ve already typed (or pasted) from ALL CAPS to lowercase or Just First Letters Capitalized.

This one’s simple: Select the text you want to change, and then choose from the Edit→Transformations submenu. Your options are Make Upper Case (all caps), Make Lower Case (no caps), and Capitalize (first letters, like a movie title).

Keep that in mind the next time some raving lunatic SENDS YOU AN EMAIL THAT WAS TYPED ENTIRELY WITH THE CAPS LOCK KEY DOWN.

Formats

Of course, if you’re really French (for example), you’ll also want to make some formatting changes on the System Preferences→Language & Region panel. First, choose your French-speaking country from the Region pop-up menu, so that time and date formats, number punctuation, and currency symbols also conform to your local customs.

For example, the decimal and thousands separator characters for displaying large numbers differ from country to country. (The number 25,600.99, for example, would be written as “25 600,99” in France, and as “25.600,99” in Spain.) And what appears to an American to be July 4 (the notation “7/4”), to a European indicates April 7.

Similarly, for Calendar purposes, you’ll want to specify what you consider to be the first day of the week and which calendar style you observe. (Hint: If you’re reading this book, it’s probably Gregorian.)

Choose the French keyboard layout from the Input Sources tab, as explained next.

Input Sources

While the Mac can display many different languages, typing in those languages is another matter. The symbols you use when you’re typing in Swedish aren’t the same as when you’re typing in English. Apple solved this problem by creating different keyboard layouts, one for each language. (Apple calls them input sources, because not all of them technically use a keyboard.) Each rearranges the letters that appear when you press the keys. For example, when you use the Swedish layout and press the semicolon key, you don’t get a semicolon (;)—you get an ö.

Apple even includes the famous Dvorak layout and the not-very-famous Colemak layout. Both are scientific rearrangements of the standard layout that put the most common letters directly under your fingertips on the home row. Fans of the Dvorak layout, and the more modern Colemak layout, claim greater accuracy, better speed, and less fatigue. To set up an input source, see Figure 7-11.

Figure 7-11. Bottom: Click the + button to view a list of keyboard layouts; choose one to add to this list.
When you do so, “Show Input menu in menu bar” turns on. That option puts a tiny flag in your menu bar (top)—a keyboard menulet that lets you switch layouts just by choosing their names.
If you turn on “Automatically switch to a document’s input source,” then each document stays put with the keyboard you’ve been using in it, even if you’ve switched to a different input source in other documents.
The “Use the Caps Lock key to switch to and from last used Latin input source” option provides a quick way to switch among certain keyboard layouts. (This option appears only if you’ve turned on a non-Roman input source like Arabic, Hebrew, or Chinese.)

The Character Viewer

There you are, two-thirds of the way through your local matchmaker newsletter, when it hits you that you need a heart symbol. Right now.

You can’t help but wish there were an easy way to find those special symbols that hide among your fonts—fancy brackets, math symbols, special stars and asterisks, and so on.

The Keyboard Viewer, described next, can generate a few of them. But to see the full range of symbols available, you need the Characters panel (also called “Emoji & Symbols”). To make it appear, choose Edit→Emoji & Symbols.

Most programs have this command. If yours doesn’t, here’s the long way: Open System Preferences→Keyboard→Input Sources tab, and then turn on “Show Input menu in menu bar.” You’ve just installed the Keyboard menulet.

Then, next time you’re word processing or doing page layout, choose Show Emoji & Symbols from this menu. The resulting window (Figure 7-12, top) rounds up all symbols from all your fonts at once. To find a particular symbol, click the various category headings: Arrows, Bullets/Stars, Math Symbols, and so on.

When you find the symbol you want, double-click it. The correct symbol pops into your document. (If not, you may get the correct character in the wrong font. In that case, change the font of the inserted character manually. To find out what font it came from, click the symbol in the Font Variation panel to see the font name.)

Keyboard Viewer

Keyboard Viewer, which is descended from the Key Caps program of old, consists of a single window containing a tiny onscreen keyboard (Figure 7-12, bottom). When you hold down any of the modifier keys on your keyboard (like , Option, Shift, or Control), you can see exactly which keys produce which characters. The point, of course, is to help you learn which keys to press when you need special symbols or non-English characters, such as © or ñ, in each keyboard layout.

Figure 7-12. Top: You can preview variations of the same symbol in the Font Variation panel. Use the search box to find a symbol by name: “heart,” “yen” or “asterisk,” for example. And if you click the menu in the top left, you can choose Customize List—and you’ll have access to a staggering array of even more symbol categories, including wacky symbols from other alphabets.
Bottom: How do you make a π? Keyboard Viewer reveals the answer. When you press the Option key, the Keyboard Viewer shows that the pi character is mapped to the P key. To insert one into an open document, just click it in the Keyboard Viewer window.

Keyboard Viewer is a great tool—if you can find it. The secret is to open System Preferences→Keyboard→Keyboard tab. Then turn on “Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar.” You open the Keyboard Viewer by choosing its name from the new menulet that appears.

To see the effect of pressing the modifier keys, either click the onscreen keys or press them on your actual keyboard. The corresponding keys on the onscreen keyboard light up as they’re pressed.

Cut, Copy, and Paste

The original copy-and-paste procedure of 1984—putting a graphic into a word processor—has come a long way. Most experienced Mac fans have learned to trigger the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands from the keyboard, quickly and without even thinking. Here’s how the process works:

1. Highlight some material in a document.

   Drag through some text in a word processor, for example, or highlight graphic, music, movie, database, or spreadsheet information, depending on the program you’re using.

2. Use the Edit→Cut or Edit→Copy command.

   Or press the keyboard shortcuts -X (for Cut—think of the X as a pair of scissors) or -C (for Copy). The Macintosh memorizes the highlighted material, socking it away on an invisible storage pad called the Clipboard. If you chose Copy, nothing visible happens. If you chose Cut, the highlighted material disappears from the original document.

   At this point, most Mac fans take it on faith that the Cut or Copy command actually worked. But if you’re in doubt, switch to the Finder (by clicking its Dock icon, for example), and then choose Edit → Show Clipboard. The Clipboard window appears, showing whatever you’ve copied.

3. Click to indicate where you want the material to reappear.

   This may entail switching to a different program, a different document, or simply a different place in the same document.

4. Choose the Edit→Paste command (-V).

   The copy of the material you had originally highlighted now appears at your insertion point—if you’re pasting into a program that can accept that kind of information. (You won’t have much luck pasting, say, a block of spreadsheet numbers into World of Warcraft.)

The most recently cut or copied material remains on your Clipboard even after you paste, making it possible to paste the same blob repeatedly. Such a trick can be useful when, for example, you’ve designed a business card in your drawing program and want to duplicate it enough times to fill a letter-sized printout. On the other hand, whenever you next copy or cut something, whatever was already on the Clipboard is lost forever.

Drag-and-Drop

As useful and popular as it is, the Copy/Paste routine doesn’t win any awards for speed. After all, it requires four steps. In many cases, you can replace that routine with the far more direct (and enjoyable) drag-and-drop method. Figure 7-14 illustrates how this works.

Virtually every Apple program works with the drag-and-drop technique, including TextEdit, Stickies, Mail, QuickTime Player, Preview, iMovie, Photos, and System Information, not to mention other popular programs like Microsoft applications, web browsers, and so on.

When to use drag-and-drop

As shown in Figure 7-14, drag-and-drop is ideal for transferring material between windows or between programs—from a web page into Photoshop, for example. It’s especially useful when you’ve already copied something valuable to your Clipboard, since drag-and-drop doesn’t involve (and doesn’t erase) the Clipboard.

Figure 7-14. To use drag-and-drop, highlight some material. Click anywhere in the highlighted area and press the mouse button for about half a second. Now, with the button still pressed, drag to another place in the document, into a different window, or into a different application. As your cursor enters the target window, a shaded outline appears inside the window’s boundaries—the Mac’s way of letting you know it understands your intention. When you release the mouse, the highlighted material appears instantly in its new location.

Its most popular use, however, is rearranging text within a single document. In Word or Pages, for example, you can rearrange entire sections, paragraphs, sentences, or even individual letters, just by dragging them—a wonderfully efficient editing technique.

Tip

When you use drag-and-drop to move text within a document, the Mac moves the highlighted text, deleting the highlighted material from its original location. If you press Option as you drag, however, you make a copy of the highlighted text.

Drag-and-drop to the desktop

You can also use drag-and-drop in the one program you use every single day: the Finder itself. As shown in Figure 7-15, you can drag text, graphics, sounds, and even movie clips out of your document windows and directly onto the desktop. Graphics and movies generally turn into ordinary graphic or movie files; text becomes an icon called a clipping file.

Figure 7-15. When you drag material out of the document window and onto the desktop or into a folder, you get a clipping file. Its icon depends on the kind of material contained within, like a text clipping, picture clipping, or movie clipping. (For easy identification, macOS conveniently titles text clippings by the first line of the text contained inside.) You can view a clipping just by double-clicking it, so that it opens into its own window (left).

Later, you can examine a clipping’s contents using Quick Look—just select its icon and then tap the space bar. Or you can double-click a clipping file and then select a portion of the text to copy.

When you drag a clipping from your desktop back into an application window, the material in that clipping reappears. Drag-and-drop, in other words, lets you treat your desktop itself as a giant, computer-wide pasteboard—an area where you can temporarily stash pieces of text or graphics as you work.

Tip

When the material you drag to the desktop contains nothing but an Internet address, such as an email address or a web page URL, it gets a special icon and a special function: an Internet location file. You can stash it in a folder, double-click it for quick access, and so on.

Export/Import

When it comes to transferring large chunks of information—especially address books, spreadsheet cells, and database records—from one program to another, none of the data-transfer methods described so far in this chapter does the trick. For these purposes, use the Export and Import commands found in the File menu of almost every database, spreadsheet, email, and address-book program. (In some programs, the Save As command serves this function.)

These Export/Import commands aren’t part of macOS, so the manuals (if any) of the applications in question should be your source for instructions. For now, however, the power and convenience of this feature are worth noting—it means that your four years’ worth of collected addresses in, say, some old email program can find their way into a newer program, like Contacts, in a matter of minutes.

By Network

You can shoot a file to another Mac with a single drag-and-drop operation, thanks to AirDrop or another file-sharing method. You can open files from the other drives, copy stuff back and forth—anything you would do with your own disk. (Step-by-step instructions for AirDrop start in “AirDrop”.)

Best for files of any size, when the computers are in the same building.

By Email

High on convenience; computers can be in different countries. Of course, the traditional problem with email was that it couldn’t handle file attachments larger than 5 or 10 megabytes. To get around that limitation, you had to use a free website like sendthisfile.com, which can handle enormous files by sending the recipient only a link to them by email.

The world has changed, though. Nowadays, the Mail program can cheerfully send huge file attachments to anyone, no matter what kind of computer she uses. See “Mail Drop: Sending Huge Attachments” for details.

Using Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service, almost universally adored, that lets you create synchronized folders on multiple computers. Add a file to, say, your New Projects folder on your home Mac, and it appears instantly in the matching folder on your Windows folder at work.

You can use Dropbox to share files with other people, too. Just drag a file into a shared folder, and marvel as your associates get an auto-generated email message letting them know. They open the shared folder on their own desktops, and there is the file, waiting. (Details are at www.dropbox.com/help/19.)

The great thing about services like Dropbox is that you don’t have to worry about the small file-size limits imposed by email. (There’s a 2-gigabyte storage limit on Dropbox’s free accounts, but you can upgrade to larger storage capacities for a fee; you also get more storage granted when you refer a friend to Dropbox.)

Via iCloud Drive

In many ways, iCloud Drive (“Revert”) is identical to Dropbox. It, too, acts as a magic folder that reproduces itself on as many Macs as you own.

It’s a fantastic way to transfer big files among your own computers. And now, thanks to iCloud file sharing, you can even make your big files available to other High Sierra fans with just a couple of clicks (see Figure 6-26).

Via Flash Drive

A flash drive, also called a thumb drive, is one of those keychain-like doodads that plug into your USB jack. Inside is a big chunk of memory that acts like a miniature hard drive. When the flash drive is plugged into your Mac, its icon shows up on the desktop as a disk. Use it as a tiny, 8-gigabyte hard drive (or whatever size you’ve bought).

The beauty of a flash drive is that it works instantly with any Mac or any Windows machine, without software installation or configuration. It’s small and light enough to carry around on your keychain…and it’s so darned cool. If you regularly transfer documents between Macs or between Macs and PCs, a flash drive will change your life.

FireWire Disk Mode/Thunderbolt Disk Mode (Target Disk Mode)

FireWire Disk Mode/Thunderbolt Disk Mode is a brilliant but little-known Macintosh-only feature that lets you turn one Mac into an external hard drive for another. This is by far the fastest method yet for transferring a lot of data—even faster than copying files over a network. It’s extremely useful in any of these situations:

• You’re traveling with a laptop. You want to copy your life onto it from your main Mac, including your entire 5 GB email folder and project files, before taking it on a trip, and then unload it when you return.

• You have a new Mac. You want to copy everything off the old one, without having to wait all night.

• One Mac won’t start up. You want to repair it, using another Mac as a “front end.”

Unfortunately, not all Macs have a FireWire or Thunderbolt jack. If you’re among the lucky, though, you can use the following trick. (In these steps, suppose your main Mac is an iMac and you want to use a MacBook as an external hard drive for it.)

1. Connect the FireWire (Thunderbolt) jacks of both computers with a cable.

   If you have an older Mac with a FireWire 400 jack, you need a 6-pin FireWire cable—not the one that connects a camcorder to a Mac. The one you need has the same large connector on both ends.

   Modern Macs have Apple’s FireWire 800 jacks, which require a 9-pin FireWire cable (and give you much greater speed). If only one Mac has a FireWire 800 jack, then use that computer’s traditional FireWire 400 connector instead. Otherwise, you need either a special FireWire 800–to–FireWire 400 cable, or the 400-to-800 adapter that came with your Mac.

2. On the MacBook, choose →System Preferences. Click Startup Disk.

   The Startup Disk panel opens.

3. Click Target Disk Mode. In the confirmation box, click Restart.

   The MacBook turns off and then on again. A giant gray FireWire icon () or Thunderbolt icon () bounces around the laptop screen.

   Now take a look at the iMac’s screen: Sure enough, there’s the MacBook’s hard drive icon on the desktop. You’re ready to copy files onto or off of it, at extremely high speeds, and go on with your life.

4. When you’re finished working with the MacBook, eject it from the iMac’s screen as you would any disk. Then turn off the laptop by pressing the power button.

   The next time you turn on the MacBook, it’ll start up from its own copy of macOS, even if the cable is still attached. (You can disconnect the cable whenever you please.)

Via Bluetooth

Bluetooth is a cable-elimination technology. It’s designed to let Bluetooth-equipped gadgets communicate within about 30 feet, using radio signals.

Bluetooth comes built into most computers and cellphones, plus the occasional printer, pocket organizer, and even camera or camcorder.

Bluetooth is built into all recent Macs. It’s ready, therefore, to connect with Apple’s wireless keyboard and mouse, to get on the Internet using a Bluetooth cellphone as a cordless modem, to listen to music through wireless headphones or speakers, and to transfer files through the air to similarly equipped gear.

Bluetooth is pretty slow. (You get transfer speeds of 30 to 150 K per second, depending on the distance.) But when you consider the time you’d have taken for wiring, passwords, and configuration using any other connection method, you may find that Bluetooth wins, at least in casual, spur-of-the-moment, airport-seat situations.

And Bluetooth works no matter what the gadget—Mac, Windows, smartphone—so it’s great as a universal file-exchange translator, too.

Preparing the Document for Transfer

The Mac is more Windows-compatible than ever. Still, before sending a document to a colleague who uses Windows, you must be able to answer “yes” to both of the following questions.

Notes on Disk Swapping

Once you’ve created a document destined for a Windows machine, your next challenge is to get it onto that machine. One way is to put the file on a disk—a CD you’ve burned, for example—which you then hand to the Windows owner.

Macs and PCs format hard drives differently. The Mac can read Windows disks and flash drives (which use unappetizingly named formatting schemes like FAT32 and NTFS), but Windows can’t read Mac hard drives or flash drives. CDs and DVDs use the same format on both kinds of computers, though, so you should have very little problem moving these between machines.

Network Notes

MacOS can “see” shared disks and folders on Windows PCs that are on the same network. Complete instructions are in Chapter 14.

Via the Internet

Chapter 21 offers details on FTP and web sharing, two ways to make your Mac available to other computers—Windows PCs or not—on the Internet. And, of course, you can always email files between Macs and PCs.

Editing the Share Menu

You can choose the options in your Share menu, and in which order they appear.

For that, you can thank the pane in System Preferences called Extensions. (One quick way to open it: From the Share menu itself, choose More.) If you click Share Menu in the left-side list, you’re treated to a System Preferences box where you can turn off the Share-menu options you never use. You can also drag items’ names up or down, so that the most useful ones appear at the top of the Share menu from now on. (You’re not allowed to turn off the Big Three: Mail, Messages, and AirDrop.) For more on Extensions, see “Scheduled Startup and Shutdown”.

Setting Up Time Machine

Here’s the bad news: Time Machine requires a second hard drive. That’s the only way to create a completely safe, automatic backup of your entire main hard drive.

That second hard drive can take any of these forms:

• An external USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt hard drive.

• An AirPort Time Capsule. That’s an AirPort wireless base station/network backup hard drive in one; it’s available in gigantic capacities.

• Another internal hard drive.

• A partition of any one of those drives.

• The hard drive of another Mac on the network (OS X 10.5 or later) that you’ve mounted on your screen.

In all cases, the backup disk must be bigger than the drive you’re backing up (preferably much bigger).

Here’s what you can’t use as the backup disk: a CD or your startup drive.

Sure, it sounds like an Apple plot to sell hard drives. But you’d be surprised at how cheap they are. At this writing, you can buy an external 2-terabyte hard drive (2,000 gigabytes) for $50, for goodness’ sake—and prices-per-gigabyte go only down.

The first time the Mac sees your second hard drive, it invites you to use it as Time Machine’s backup drive (“Do you want to use ‘Seagate 2TB Drive’ to back up with Time Machine?”). That could be the moment you connect an external drive, or the first time you turn on the Mac after installing an internal drive.

If you click Use as Backup Disk, you’re taken immediately to the Time Machine pane of System Preferences (Figure 7-18). Here’s where you see that Time Machine is turned on and has a drive it can use for backups.

Soon enough, the Mac starts copying everything on your hard drive, including macOS itself, all your programs, and everyone’s Home folders. You know that because you see the symbol in the Sidebar (next to the backup disk’s name), and the menu-bar Time Machine icon looks like .

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the easiest setup for a backup program in history.

Figure 7-18. Use the Back Up Automatically checkbox to manage Time Machine activity, although it would be hard to imagine why you’d want to risk leaving it off. You can click Select Backup Disk to choose a different hard drive to represent the mirror of your main drive (after the first one is full, for example).

Now go away and let the Mac do its thing. The first backup can take hours, as the Mac duplicates your entire internal hard drive onto the second drive. The Mac may feel drugged during this time.

How the Backups Work

From now on, Time Machine quietly checks your Mac once an hour. If any file, folder, or setting has changed, it gets backed up at the end of the hour. These follow-up backups are quick; Time Machine backs up only what’s changed. So, should disaster strike, the only files you can lose are those you’ve changed within the past 59 minutes.

By the end of the day, you’ll have 24 hourly backups on that second disk, all taking up space. So at day’s end, Time Machine replaces that huge stash with a single daily backup. You can no longer rewind your system to 3:00 p.m. last Monday, but you can rewind to the way it was at the end of that day.

Similarly, after a month, Time Machine replaces those 30 dailies (for example) with four weekly backups. Now you may not be able to rewind to October 12, but you can rewind to the end of that week. (Apple assumes it won’t take you that long to notice that your hard drive has crashed.)

The point is that Time Machine doesn’t just keep one copy of your stuff. It keeps multiple backups. It remembers how things were in every folder—not just yesterday, but last week, last month, and so on. It keeps on making new snapshots of your hard drive until the backup drive is full.

At that point, the oldest ones get deleted to make room for new ones.

By the way, if a backup is interrupted—if you shut down the Mac, put it to sleep, or take your laptop on the road—no big deal. Time Machine can keep working on its own, as you’ll see in the next section, and resumes backing up to the backup drive the next time you’re connected.

Local Snapshots

If you’re among the 75 percent of Mac owners with a laptop, Time Machine used to be something of a bust in one regard: Whenever you were away from your backup disk (at home or the office, for example), you lost the benefits of Time Machine.

Today, crazy as this may sound, Time Machine keeps on working even on a laptop that’s far from home. Thanks to a feature called local snapshots, Time Machine works as usual by making its backups right on the laptop’s own hard drive.

Of course, this system won’t help you if your hard drive dies; your backup is on the same drive, so you’ll lose the originals and the backups simultaneously. But what local snapshots do provide is a safety net—a way to recover a file you deleted or changed during this time away. Better yet, once you’re home again, when your laptop rejoins the network, the local snapshots intelligently merge with the master Time Machine backups, as though you’d never been away.

If Time Machine is turned on on your laptop, it makes local snapshots automatically—once an hour, as usual. As time goes on, Time Machine deletes snapshots more than 24 hours old to save disk space.

If you need to recover a file, enter Time Machine as usual. Your local snapshots show up on the same timeline as backups made on your external backup disk, but they’re color-coded: pink tick marks for external backups, gray for local ones. If the pink bars are dimmed, it’s because you’re not hooked up to your Time Machine backup drive.

Changing Time Machine Settings

Time Machine has four faces. There’s the application itself, which sits in your Applications folder; open it only when you want to enter Restore mode. There’s its Dock icon, which also enters Restore mode, but which has a shortcut menu containing useful commands like Back Up Now (and Stop Backing Up).

There’s the Time Machine menulet, which may be the handiest of all. It identifies the time and date of the most recent backup, offers Back Up Now/Skip This Backup commands, and has direct access to Time Machine’s Restore mode and preferences pane.

Finally, there’s its System Preferences pane, where you adjust its settings (Figure 7-18). To see it, choose → System Preferences→Time Machine. Or choose Time Machine Preferences from Time Machine’s Dock icon or menulet.

Recovering Lost or Changed Files

All right, you’ve got Time Machine on the job. You sleep easy at night, confident that your life is in order—and your stuff is backed up.

Then, one day, it happens: Your hard drive crashes. Or you can’t find a file or folder you know you had. Or you save a document in some non–Auto Save program and then wish you could go back to an earlier draft. Some kind of disaster—sunspots, clueless spouse, overtired self—has befallen your files. This is Time Machine’s big moment.

Start by pinpointing what you’re looking for, in one of these two ways:

• Open the disk or folder window where the missing or changed item was.

• Type what you’re looking for into the search box at the top of any Finder window. Click the location button that makes the most sense: “This Mac” or the name of the window you’re in.

  In the case of deleted files or folders, the search will probably come up empty; that’s totally OK.

Now click the Time Machine icon on the Dock, or choose Enter Time Machine from the menulet (Figure 7-19, top).

Everything else on your desktop fades away. Front and center is your Finder window—or, rather, dozens of them, stretching back in time (Figure 7-19, bottom). Each is a snapshot of that window at the time of a Time Machine backup.

You have four ways to peruse your backup universe:

• Click individual windows to see what’s in them.

• Drag your cursor through the timeline at the right side. It’s like a master dial that flies through the windows into the past.

• Click one of the two big, flat arrows. The one pointing into the past means “Jump directly to the most recent window version that’s different from the way it is right now.” In other words, it’s often a waste of time to go flipping through the windows one at a time, because your missing or changed file might have been missing or changed for the last 25 backups (or whatever). What you want to know is the last time the contents of this window changed. And that’s what the big, flat arrows do. They jump from one changed version of this window to another. (Or, if you began with a search, the arrow takes you to the most recent backup with a matching result.)

• Use the search box in the corner of the window. You can search for whatever you’re missing in the current backup.

Figure 7-19. Top: Choose Enter Time Machine from the menulet. (If you don’t see this menulet, then turn on “Show Time Machine in menu bar,” shown in Figure 7-18.)
Bottom: The starry outer-space background of the old Time Machine is gone, but everything works the same way: You see dozens of copies of the Finder window, representing its condition at each backup, stretching back to the past.

As you go, the very bottom of the screen identifies where you are in time—that is, which backup you’re examining.

In many ways, the recovery mode is just like the Finder. You can’t actually open, edit, rename, or reorganize anything here. But you can use Quick Look to inspect the documents to make sure you’ve got the right version. And you can use icon, list, column, or Cover Flow views to sort through the files you’re seeing.

If you’re trying to recover an older version of a file or folder, highlight it and then click the flat arrow button that’s pointing away from you; Time Machine skips back to the most recent version that’s different from the current one.

If you’re trying to restore a deleted file or folder that you’ve now located, highlight it and then click Restore (lower right). Presto: The lost file or folder is back in the window where it belonged.

Frequently Asked Questions

Time Machine is a very different kind of backup program, and a real departure for longtime Mac addicts. A few questions, therefore, are bound to come up—like these:

• Can I back up more than one Mac onto the same disk? Yes. Each Mac’s backup is stored in a separate folder on that disk.

• Can I use more than one backup disk—like one at the office and one at home? Yes. Just use the Time Machine pane of System Preferences (or the Time Machine Dock icon’s shortcut menu) to select the new backup drive each time you switch.

• Can I delete something from all the backups at once? Yes. Click the Time Machine icon on the Dock to enter the Restore mode. Find and select the file or folder you want to obliterate. From the menu, choose Delete All Backups of [the Thing’s Name]. (Sneaky, huh? That command is never in the menu except when you’re in Time Machine restoring mode.)