How to Fix Your Mac

Macs have the best, and worst, defaults

I use a Mac because it offers an unbeatable laptop experience, and with the ARM64 hardware is now powerful enough I just dock it instead of using a desktop too. What I like most is my Mac just works. A big part of that is that it has reasonable defaults that I don’t need to screw around with.

For the most part.

The Profound Arrogance of Being #1

It seems that because they do offer the best experience and have done so for so long now that they’re largely allergic to feedback. Oddly, they did finally give on on the hardware side in the last few years. Take the MacBook Pro:

• They added other ports like HDMI back
• They added MagSafe back
• No more awful keyboard
• It’s a little thicker / heavier and has better cooling (and thus better performance) + a bigger battery now

Funny enough, now that I dock my laptop I do kinda get the ports thing. I almost never use them. But the downsides to them being there are almost 0. When I do need HDMI, or am traveling + working and thus need to actually charge in odd places, I highly value having my ports back. There’s no real downside to them being there it’s dead space on the chassis and is a rounding error on cost.

Their software division on the other hand has had no such personal growth.

Fixing MacOS Nonsense

In no particular order, here are things that are wrong on MacOS and how to fix them.

Scrolling

“Natural scrolling” where the direction is inverted on a trackpad makes a lot of sense. There’s a “natural” argument, and it matching mobile experience makes a lot of sense. This falls short on a mouse because:

1. There’s no “natural” direction it’s a wheel
2. We have decades of history and exposure to the opposite

But Apple, in their infinite wisdom, says you can’t have one without the other. Worse yet, in the settings screen mouse and trackpad each have their own setting! So it looks like you can change one without the other, but it secretly changes both! At a minimum, this is indisputably a bug.

You can argue, poorly, about offering the individual control settings, you can’t argue that presenting them as independent when they’re not is good design.

There a multiple options out there for having natural scroll on track pad and correct scroll on mouse, personally I use: Scroll Reverser for macOS (pilotmoon.com)

Home + End

Home + End keys are very useful, and don’t do on Mac what they do on every other kind of computer. In a text editor, they should go to the start / end of the line. On Mac for some reason it’s the start / end of the document. This isn’t useful even if it didn’t unnecessarily violate norms.

More annoying, not all apps integrate with the OS level settings. Many have the mappings built in. So the buttons will do inconsistent things in different apps!

You can switch the the correct key binding by running this in terminal:

mkdir -p $HOME/Library/KeyBindings echo '{ /* Remap Home / End keys to be correct */ "\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* Home */ "\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:"; /* End */ "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift + Home */ "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift + End */ "^\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfDocument:"; /* Ctrl + Home */ "^\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfDocument:"; /* Ctrl + End */ "$^\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfDocumentAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift + Ctrl + Home */ "$^\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfDocumentAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift + Ctrl + End */ }' > $HOME/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Window Snapping

Macs window snapping is annoying, it requires full screen for some reason. I’ve heard originally it was patent related, not sure how true that is. Either way, it’s not a good implementation imo. Funny enough, newer Windows is more like Mac but instead of full screen it tries to do “groups” after you snap.

To get the snapping you expect on any other OS, I use Rectangle App.

iTunes / Apple Music

One of the cool features of AirPods is the handoff between your phone and computer. A not so cool aspect is if your headphones switcher over and you unpause, that can go to an unintended device. If it goes to your Mac and you have nothing playing, for some reason that will cause iTunes or Apple Music to launch instead of just no-oping.

There’s no way to disable this. But, there is a tool that disables these apps. Since I don’t use either, noTunes solves this issue for me.