There are a lot of awesome settings on a Mac that you can only access through the command line. Yes, you can Google those commands and write them down. But there has to be a better way. And there is. In this post, I show you TinkerTool a free utility that contains a ton of settings that you can change with a nice GUI.
Installing TinkerTool
TinkerTool is not available on the AppStore but is easy to install.
- Download tinkertool from the tinkertool website.
- Click on the TinkerTool.dmg file
- Agree to the license
- Open a Finder window and select the Applications folder
- Drag the TinkerTool.app icon to the Applications folder TinkerTool is now installed
Running TinkerTool
The first time you run the app you get the familiar warning that this is an app downloaded from the internet.
Click Open.
Now you have a world of options available to you. Your preferences will be different than mine. I don't have much patience for animations so I tend to disable them. Note that changes in the finder settings don't take place until you relaunch Finder. Fortunately, a big Relaunch Finder button is included.
Then the dock I have the dock usually hidden as it saves screen space. This is a setting in the Dock & Menu bar. Make sure the option Automatically hide and show the Dock is enabled.
> System Preferences > Dock and Menu Bar
Now, whenever I move my mouse to the right side of the screen(where I keep the dock) The dock pops up in an animated way.
I don't like that so the animation and the delay to show the hidden dock are disabled. Another useful setting is to have dimmed icons for applications that are open but hidden behind another window.
I know I sound boring but in the Launchpad section, I also have the animations disabled.
Enabling the backspace button in Safari
In older versions of Safari, you could use the backspace key to navigate back to the previous website. For reasons beyond me, this functionality has disappeared in recent versions. With TinkerTool you can get that functionality back but Tinkertool must have full disk access to make that happen
- Open > System Preferences > Security and Privacy
- Click on the privacy tab
- On the left bar, scroll down and select Full Disk Access
- Click the lock icon
- Enable TinkerTool
Now select the Safari tab inside TinkerTool and enable Backspace key can be used to navigate back.
Now you can use the back key on your keyboard to navigate back to the previous webpage in Safari.
Conclusion
TinkerTool is a free utility that gives you many configuration options that would otherwise involve Googling commands from the internet. In this post I showed the options I use in TinkerTool but there are many more. Enjoy.