Stop hunting through your Dock. Spotlight is the fastest launcher, calculator, unit converter, and file finder on your Mac, and most people barely scratch the surface of what it can do.

1. Press ⌘ + Space from any app, any context. It just appears.
2. Start typing immediately. Results populate in real time, no need to finish the word.
3. Use the arrow keys to move through results, then press Return to open.
4. Want to find the file in Finder rather than open it? Hold ⌘ and press Return instead.
5. Try typing a sum like 347 * 12 or a conversion like 5 miles in km. Spotlight handles both without opening anything.

macOS has a genuinely powerful screenshot suite built right in. Three shortcuts. Full screen, custom region, and a full toolbar for video recording and timed captures.

1. Press ⌘⇧3 to grab the entire screen instantly. Done.
2. Press ⌘⇧4 to drag-select any region. After pressing the shortcut, tap Space to switch to window-capture mode, which snaps a clean screenshot of just one window with a subtle drop shadow.
3. Press ⌘⇧5 to open the full Screenshot toolbar. From here you can record the screen, set a timer, or choose where the file saves.
4. After any capture, a small thumbnail floats in the corner. Click it before it disappears to annotate, crop, or mark it up before saving.
5. Add ⌃ (Control) to any of these shortcuts to copy the screenshot straight to the clipboard rather than saving a file. Useful when you're pasting directly into a message or document.

You almost certainly know about ⌘Z. But do you actually use it to its full depth? Undo isn't just for typing mistakes. It works in Finder, in image editors, in drawing tools. Knowing redo exists is equally useful.

1. Press ⌘Z to undo the most recent action in almost any app.
2. Keep pressing it to step further back through history. In apps like Pages you can go quite far.
3. Press ⌘⇧Z to redo. Stepped back too far? This puts it back.
4. In Finder, ⌘Z undoes file renames, moves, and even sends recently deleted files back to their original location.

The spinning beachball. Everyone's least favourite sight. Instead of waiting it out or force-restarting your Mac, one shortcut opens the Force Quit window from anywhere.

1. Press ⌘⌥Esc (Command + Option + Escape) from any context, even if the frozen app is in the foreground.
2. A small window lists all open apps. The unresponsive one will usually say "not responding" next to it.
3. Select the app and click Force Quit.
4. If you want to skip the list entirely, hold ⌘⌥⇧Esc for about three seconds to force-quit just the frontmost app with no confirmation.

Alt-tabbing through a pile of windows is painful once you have more than five or six open. Mission Control shows you everything at a glance and lets you jump straight to the one you want.

1. Press ⌃↑ (Control + Up Arrow) or F3 to enter Mission Control. Every open window spreads out across the screen.
2. Click any window thumbnail to go directly to it.
3. Drag a window thumbnail up to the top bar to create a new Space (virtual desktop), or drop it onto an existing Space to move it there.
4. Press ⌃← or ⌃→ to slide between Spaces without opening Mission Control at all. Useful once you have a few Spaces set up.
5. Press ⌃↓ to see all windows from just the current app. App Exposé. Underrated.

macOS Sonoma includes Stage Manager, which automatically shuffles inactive windows off to the side so your current task stays front and centre. No closing, no hiding. They're just... out of the way.

1. Enable it via Control Centre → Stage Manager, or System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Stage Manager.
2. Your active window (or window group) sits in the main area. Recent apps stack in a strip on the left.
3. Click any thumbnail in the left strip to switch to that app's windows.
4. Drag a thumbnail from the strip onto the current stage to group two apps together. Useful for pairing a browser and a notes window.
5. Click an empty area of the desktop to temporarily reveal your files and widgets without switching to Finder.

A thought arrives mid-meeting and you don't want to lose it. Quick Note floats over whatever you're doing, lets you jot it down, and saves it automatically. No app switching. No context loss.

1. Press Fn + Q on recent MacBooks to open a Quick Note from any app.
2. Alternatively, set up a Hot Corner: System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Hot Corners → assign a corner to "Quick Note".
3. Type your note. It saves automatically. No save button, no filename.
4. Open the Notes app later to find everything in the Quick Notes folder.
5. You can add links, images, and tags after the fact inside the full Notes app if the note needs expanding.

What if moving your cursor to a corner of the screen instantly locked your Mac, showed your desktop, or opened Mission Control? Hot Corners do exactly that. No shortcut to remember.

1. Go to System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Hot Corners.
2. Click the drop-down for any corner and assign an action. Good options: Mission Control, Desktop, Lock Screen, Quick Note.
3. Here's the key tip: hold a modifier key like ⌥ while clicking the drop-down to assign that key as a required trigger. The corner only fires when you hold that key and move the cursor to the corner. Prevents accidental triggers entirely.
4. Move your cursor firmly into the assigned corner to activate. There's a very slight delay, intentional, to prevent glancing triggers.

Copy a phone number on your iPhone. Paste it into your Mac. No AirDrop, no email, no notes app as a middleman. Universal Clipboard does this silently in the background once it's set up.

1. Make sure all your Apple devices are signed into the same Apple ID.
2. On your Mac: System Settings → General → AirDrop & Handoff → turn on "Allow Handoff".
3. On iPhone or iPad: Settings → General → AirDrop & Handoff → enable Handoff there too.
4. Make sure Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are both active on every device involved.
5. Now just copy normally on one device (⌘C on Mac, or long-press → Copy on iOS) and paste on the other within a couple of minutes.

There are menu items you click dozens of times a week that have no keyboard shortcut. macOS lets you assign one yourself, to any app, any menu item, without installing anything extra.

1. Go to System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts.
2. Click the + button. Choose your target app from the dropdown (or pick "All Applications" to make it global).
3. Type the Menu Title exactly as it appears in the app's menu bar. Exactly. If the menu item says "Export as PDF…" with an ellipsis, you need to type that ellipsis too.
4. Click in the Keyboard Shortcut field and press the key combination you want to assign.
5. Click Add. The shortcut is live immediately. No restart required.