The Best Mac Settings to Change First

macOS ships with defaults chosen for someone who has never used a Mac. That is the right call for Apple and the wrong one for you after the first week. These are the settings that repay the two minutes it takes to change them, in the order I would do them on a Mac I had just unboxed.

Finder: stop hiding things from me

Finder's defaults hide information you need constantly. Four changes fix most of it.

1. Show all file extensions. Finder → Settings → Advanced → Show all filename extensions. Without this you cannot tell a .pages from a .pdf at a glance, and it is a small security matter too, since a hidden extension is how a disguised file gets opened.
2. Show the path bar. View menu → Show Path Bar. A strip at the bottom of every window telling you exactly where you are, and you can drag files onto any part of it.
3. Keep folders on top. Finder → Settings → Advanced → Keep folders on top when sorting by name. Folders stop being scattered through your files alphabetically.
4. Search the current folder by default. Finder → Settings → Advanced → When performing a search → Search the Current Folder. Searching your whole Mac when you are standing in the right folder is almost never what you meant.

Keyboard: the single biggest speed change

The key repeat rate is the setting most people never touch and immediately notice. Hold an arrow key and watch how slowly the cursor crawls, then set it properly:

# fastest repeat, and a short wait before it starts
defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 2
defaults write NSGlobalDomain InitialKeyRepeat -int 15

# back to the macOS defaults
defaults delete NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat
defaults delete NSGlobalDomain InitialKeyRepeat

Log out and back in. Lower is faster; KeyRepeat -int 1 is faster than the slider in System Settings allows, which is why it is worth doing here. While you are in the keyboard area, turn off autocorrect and smart quotes if you write code or anything technical, in System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → Edit.

Dock: reclaim the screen

• Auto-hide with no delay. Auto-hiding is in System Settings, but the half-second pause before the Dock appears is not. Setting autohide-delay to 0 makes it feel instant.
• Turn off recent applications. System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Show suggested and recent apps in Dock. It fills your Dock with things you opened once.
• Stop the bounce. A Dock icon jumping for attention is a notification you did not choose.

# instant auto-hide, no bouncing
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0
defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool true
killall Dock

# undo both
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay
defaults delete com.apple.dock no-bouncing
killall Dock

Screenshots: fix the two annoying defaults

macOS screenshots land on your desktop with a large drop shadow around every window shot. Both are worth changing on day one.

# no shadow around window screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

# save to a folder instead of burying the desktop
mkdir -p ~/Pictures/Screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots

killall SystemUIServer

Undo either by deleting the key with defaults delete. The shadow one is the difference between a clean image you can paste anywhere and one with eighty pixels of grey fuzz on every side.

Privacy: three switches, two minutes

1. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Advertising → turn off Personalised Ads.
2. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements → turn off sharing with Apple and with developers.
3. System Settings → Lock Screen → require a password immediately after the screen saver begins. The default grace period is a real gap in a shared office.

None of these cost you a feature. They are defaults chosen for Apple's benefit rather than yours.

Do them in the right order

Change settings in batches by area rather than one at a time across a week. You will remember what you did, you will notice which change was responsible if something feels different, and if you ever set up a second Mac you can repeat the list in ten minutes instead of rediscovering it.