THE BEST HIDDEN SETTINGS YOU CAN UNLOCK WITH OS X's TERMINAL

Macs aren't known for their customization options, but there's a lot hiding under the hood if you're willing to dig into the Terminal. Here are some of our favorite hidden settings you can change with just a line or two of text. What Is Terminal? If you're unfamiliar with it, Terminal is an emulator app included with OS X inside your Utilities folder that is a text-based way to use your operating system. Essentially, it allows you to interact with OS X with just text commands instead of a mouse and graphic interface. As a Mac user, you probably don't delve into the Terminal often, but there are a lot of settings and tweaks hidden behind the scenes. Terminal's great for uncovering these. Using the Terminal is simple: just open it up, type in a command, and press Return. Your command might manipulate files, launch programs, change settings, and more. It looks complicated, but it's actually the simplest way to access certain things on your computer. We've talked about the basics of command line before, so if you need to you can brush up on the beginner tips there. We've covered plenty of advanced features as well. Don't let all that intimidate you, though. Today, we're going to look at some very simple commands that enable or tweak hidden OS X options. You won't need to be a Terminal expert to pull these off—just copy and paste the command from this post, paste it into the Terminal, and press Return to try them out. Here are some of our favorite tweaks. Customize OS X's Look and Feel One thing people love to do with Terminal is change a bunch of the settings in OS X that Apple doesn't outright allow them to do. This might be changing the look of the dock, the scrollbars, or just making it so you can see hidden files.

-Move Your Mac's Dock to the Corner

Don't like the dock being in the center of the screen? You can move it to any corner you want with this Terminal command: defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end killall Dock If you'd rather move the dock to the top or back to the default, just replace the word end with start or middle instead.

-Add Widgets to Your Desktop

Love them or hate them, Apple seems to have no problem keeping widgets around in OS X's Dashboard. If you'd prefer to use those widgets on your desktop, you can do so with this command: defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES Now, log out and log back in. Open up your Dashboard, grab the widget you want by clicking and holding it with your mouse, and hit F12 to drop it onto your desktop. If the widgets don't appear, hop back into Terminal and type: killall Dock To reverse the process, just do the above in reverse, and change YES to NO in the first command.

-Show Hidden Files by Default

OS X hides all kinds of files to keep you from messing up your system. That's all well and good, but sometimes you need to access those hidden files. To see them, type this command into Terminal: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true killall Dock To hide those files again, just switch true to false.

Add Features to OS X

OS X always has a few features hidden away that can only be accessed via a Terminal command. Sometimes these are features you've always wanted, while other times they're just not needed by most people, a little buggy, or meant for developers. Enable the 2D Dock Don't like that 3D dock? It's easy to make it 2D (Doesn't work in Mavericks): defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool true If you want that 3D dock back, just change true to false.

-Enable Single Application Mode

If you struggle with distractions a lot, single application mode can be a huge help to keep yourself focused. This makes it so you only have one app showing at once. It's not for everyone, but it's really helpful when you need to just focus on a single project: defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true killall Dock To switch it back to normal, just swap out true with false.

-Copy Text from Quick Look

Quick Look is one of OS X's best features. Just hit the Spacebar when you select a file, and you'll see a preview of that file without having to open up an app. It's great, but you can't select any text when you're in the preview. You can add that feature with a Terminal command: defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool true killall Finder Now, just open up Quick Look, select the text you want, and copy away.