macOS improvifier

A collection of hidden settings that makes Macs feel (and sometimes run) a bit faster

Over the last few decades, the folks at Apple have pioneered an enormous number of friendly, cute, fun, and often elegant details into their software – especially macOS, their most mature operating system.

Unfortunately, a great many of these details confer a diminished experience for more advanced users, who require maximal responsiveness, minimal UI guardrails, and reduced barriers to operating at the speed of thought.

This shell script includes a curated list of defaults write commands that strip out many of the small animations and delays that make every Mac feel just a wee bit slower. It also adds a number of (hopefully) helpful hidden defaults / options across the Finder, Dock and throughout macOS.

Running macOS improvifications

1. Pull down this repo (or just download mac-unsuck.sh)
2. Ensure the shell script is executable on your filesystem
3. Run the shell script: $ ./mac-unsuck.sh
4. Restart your computer
   • Yes, you could just restart Finder, Dock, etc., but some of these settings do require a full login/logout, so just restart

What it does

General speed improvements

• Disable window + popover open / close animations
• Speed up showing / hiding sheets, resizing pref windows, zooming windows, etc.
• Speed up closing QuickLook windows
• Hide the dock faster
• Disable dock animations
• Disable Finder animations
• Speed up Mission Control / Exposé animations

Finder tweaks

• Disable extension change warning (wtf)
• Enable Finder quitting
• Show full posix path in title bar
• Show Finder path bar
• Show all filename extensions
• Limit finder search scope to current dir
• Disable DS_Store
• Select text from QuickLook (may no longer work)

Misc

• Disable download quarantining
• TextEdit defaults to plaintext, not rich text
• Disable TextEdit ruler
• Enable more sensible power / sleep button settings
• Slow down Time Machine backup interval from hourly to every 4 hours
• Send screenshots to desktop subfolder (~/Desktop/Screenshots)
• Disable screenshot shadow
• Dim hidden apps in the dock
• Repeat a letter upon holding a keypress
• Repeat that letter quickly!
• Disable t.co URLs in TweetBot

Contributing

Your suggestions are welcome. Please PR this repo!