Mac tips & shortcuts for Windows users
01 Dec 2015I'm a Windows user. I grok Windows. It feels at home. When I open a Mac, it feels alien. There are things I like right off the bat - a nice screen, a backlit keyboard, good battery (yes please!) and many UI metaphors are just the same
When using an iPhone for the first time, things are immediately obvious. It's optimized for discoverability. With Macs (and OS X), well... it's more complicated. It's optimized for efficiency (I guess).
But in order to be efficient, you need to do common tasks using muscle memory, which requires training, which takes time. Even more so if you have to stop every so often to google how to do this-and-that on a Mac.
So I'm writing this article as a one-stop-shop for your (and my) ramp-up.
Common keyboard shortcuts
If you use a common keyboard shortcut in Windows, like Ctrl-S, chances are it will work in OS X. Just substitute Ctrl with Cmd.
The Cmd key is the one with the little "flower doodle": ⌘
These just work:
Cut,Copy,Paste,Select allSave,UndoBold,ItalicNew,Open,Print- Just about every shortcut in Adobe Photoshop. It was built for Macs first, after all.
Switching apps and windows
In Windows, Alt-Tab goes through all open windows, regardless if they belong to the same application or not.
In OS X, the closest equivalent is Cmd-Tab - but it only switches applications. If you have 3 Chrome windows open, and nothing else, Cmd-Tab will do nothing (all windows are part of the same application - Chrome)
There is another, less known shortcut that switches only between windows of the same application: Cmd-`. That's the backtick key and it is usually located above the Tab key. This shortcut ignores minimized windows.
There's another way to select one of the windows of the currently active application: the "3-finger swipe down" gesture shows all windows of the application, including minimized ones.
Nomenclature for similar notions
| Windows | Mac |
|---|---|
| Task bar | Dock |
| Tray (bottom-right corner) | Status menus (top-right corner) |
| Start menu (for a list of installed programs) | Launch Pad (rocket icon) or do a pinch gesture with thumb+three fingers |
| Start menu (for typing to filter things by name) | Spotlight (Cmd-space or magnifier icon in the top-right corner) |
| Shutdown/Restart/Logoff | Apple menu (top left) |
Common programs
| Windows | Mac |
|---|---|
| Windows Explorer | Finder (look for the half blue / half white face) |
| Notepad | Nothing. See below. |
| Wordpad | TextEdit. If you want to save plain text (like Notepad): Format > Make plain text |
| Task manager | Activity Monitor |
| Resource Monitor | Activity Monitor |
| Command Prompt | Terminal |
| Solitaire | Nothing built-in (the shock! the horror!) But you can play tetris in text mode inside Emacs for major geek points! |
Closing things
There are a dozen ways to close documents, applications, tabs, popups and whatnot. This is one of the places where Macs are just... different.
The most obvious one is the little red round x button in the top-left corner of most any window.
It does something different in OS X than in Windows: it closes the current window, but not the application - not even if the application only ever has one window.
You can quickly tell which apps are running by the little dot under their icon in the dock.
If you want to really close the application, you need to right-click (or Ctrl-click) its dock icon and click Quit.
To recap:
| Action | Win | Mac |
|---|---|---|
| Close current document/tab | Ctrl-F4 |
Cmd-W (but leaves the application running) |
| Close application | Alt-F4 |
Cmd-Q |
Moving through text with the keyboard
| Action | Win | Mac |
|---|---|---|
| Beginning/end of row | Home/End | Cmd-left/right |
| Jump over a word | Ctrl-left/right | Alt-left/right |
| Prev/next page | Page up/Page down | fn-up/down |
Deleting text
There's no Del key on my Macbook!
The key known to Windows users as Backspace is called Delete in OS X. It deletes text to the left of the cursor (like Backspace)
In order to delete text to the right of the cursor (like Del), use the combination fn - Delete.
Finder
Deleting files
| Action | Win | Mac |
|---|---|---|
| Move file to trash | Delete | Cmd-Delete |
| Permanently delete file | Shift-Delete | nothing built-in, just empty the trash after deleting |
Chrome
Some of the actions I use most in Chrome don't have a 1:1 mapping between Windows and OS X. Sigh.
| Action | Win | Mac |
|---|---|---|
| Refresh | F5 | Cmd-R |
| Switch between tabs | Ctrl-Tab/Ctrl-Shift-Tab | Cmd-Alt-left/right |
Neat features only found in OS X
Previous versions of a document
I was blown away by how well integrated this feature is. As far as I know, there's nothing as streamlined in Windows.
In most applications that deal with documents, go to File > Revert to > Browse All versions and find all the previous versions of the document you're working with, neatly displayed, one for every time you pressed Save.
The tip of the iceberg
The points I have touched are just things off the top of my tired, sleepy head late at night. I'm pretty sure I have missed things I do regularly.
And I am certain there are so many tricks that I simply don't know.
I would love to hear about your favourite tricks in the comments! You know... learn and let learn.