Learn about the Mac’s General Preferences.
In this lesson for macOS, I look at the General Preference pane in more detail. The General Preference pane is where you can set if you want to use Dark Mode (new in macOS Mojave), if you want to show the scrollbars in a window, as well as the default browser you want to use.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
Introduction: In this video, we’re going to take a closer look at our general preferences. There’s a lot of little hidden gems in the general preferences that I want to show you. Let’s go to my Mac. Let’s go down to our system preferences, and I want to open up my general preferences. Now I click and hold, and then we go to General. Select it, and we have our general preferences.
The first option here is for our appearance. This is new on macOS Mojave. We can now set the Mac to be in dark mode. Let’s click on Dark to see what I mean. Now we can see our dock, our menu bar, even our windows are dark. Let’s go and open up a new Finder window, and we can see our window is in dark mode. To go back to our lighter mode, I’m going to close this window. We click on Light, and now it is light. Our next option is for the accent color. When we go under a menu, as an example, you’re going to see when I click on it, it turns blue. This is the accent color. If I want to change to a different color, let’s go ahead and click on Red. Now you’re going to see when I go up to the window; it is red. We’re also going to see that my radio buttons here are red. I’m going to go back to blue. We have our highlight, which reflects what our accent color is. When I go back over to red, you’re going to see that our highlight is also red. This is when we highlight text as an example.
Our sidebar icon size. I’m going to open up a new window. We have our sidebar here. Let’s move this to the side. Watch what happens to the sidebar when I go and select Large. We can see that the sidebar icon size is larger. I’m going to go back to Medium. Then we can also automatically hide and show the menu bar. Remember how the menu bar always shows unless you’re in full-screen mode. When I select this, we can see up at the top, our menu bar disappeared. To get our menu bar back, we bring our cursor up, and it comes back. Move the cursor away; it disappears again.
We have scroll bars. I’m going to move this window to the side here. Let’s take a look at this window here. I’m going to go into list view, and we’re going to go to our applications folder. You’re going to notice that we do not have a scroll bar here. When I scroll up, I’m going to swipe up here because I have a trackpad. Our scroll bar appears, but then when I moved my cursor away, it disappears. To get it back again, what I have to do is I have to scroll again. What we can do is we can show the scroll bars when Scrolling and Always.
If I click on Always, now we can see that the scroll bar is always there. When scrolling, it’s going to show when it is scrolling, and then when I move my cursor away, it disappears. Then we have Automatic, which is what it is by default, which usually means it’s when it’s scrolling. Click on the scroll bar to jump to the next page or jump to the spot that’s clicked. What does this mean? Let’s go back over to our scroll bar here. When I click on this, let’s go ahead and click on it down here. What is this going to do? Is it going to jump to where I am clicking? Or is it just going to scroll up one page? Right now, to set to jump to the next page.
I’m going to have to click on this a few times to get where my cursor is. I go all the way down to the bottom. I got to click, click, click, and now it’s there. What I can do is I can set this to jump to the spot that is clicked. Let’s go ahead and select this. When I bring my scroll bar up, if I click here, watch what happens. The scroll bar jumps to that spot. I go back down here; I click, the scroll bar jumps. I’m going to leave it at jump to the next page.
We have our default web browser. We can set it for any other browser. I have Firefox, Google Chrome, as well as Parallels Desktop installed. So I can set up for any one of those browsers. As to keep changes when closing documents, remember when I talked about autosaving documents, when I close the document, it automatically saves it. If you want it to ask you to save changes, this is the old behavior of macOS. All you want to do is you want to select this. When you select this, when you close a document, it’s going to ask you if you’re going to save it. I like to have the autosave on, so I’m going to leave this off.
Our next option is for closing windows when quitting the app. Let’s say I’m in pages, and I have two or three documents open, right now with this on, what’s going to happen is when I close that application, when I close pages, and I open it back up, my documents are not going to reopen. It’s not going to open up to my open documents. If you de-select this and then quit pages, the open documents will automatically reopen. I like to have this behavior. I’m going to go and turn this off. Now when I quit an app that has documents open, when I open that app back up, that’s also going to open up those documents.
Our recent items, this is underneath our Apple menu. It is set for ten items. When I go up to my Apple menu, you’re going to see; we have recent items. We have ten items here. What I can do is I can set it for a different number, including none. If you’re not going to use recent items, you could set it to none. We also have allowed a handoff between the Mac and my iCloud devices. If I open up mail on my iPhone, what I can do is I can hand off a message that I’m composing to my Mac.
Then we have font smoothing. I will usually leave this on. It depends on the monitor that you have, but what this will do is this will smooth out the fonts a little bit. It’s a very subtle change, but to some people, it may look a bit strange, so you may want to do is turn this off. Generally speaking, this is always on.
Those are general preferences we have on the Mac.