Apple’s Mac OS X is so versatile that you can do almost anything you want with it; Yes, even sexing it up if you want to. The point here is, there are many hidden features and settings that many users never bother to know, with the exception of enthusiasts. So I will be trying to compile these treasures as often as I can; Therefore I do not know how many parts this post will be in, but rest assure that it will come to an end… when Apple comes to an end.

I wrote about one Dock trick in an earlier post and have decided to expand my “Tips and Tricks” archive. Most of the tips and tricks I will be mentioning in this post will apply to Snow Leopard and they will be in the form of terminal commands, so for those of you who are not familiar with the terminal, have no fear. The terminal app is located at /Applications/Utilities and you can copy and paste or just highlight then drag and drop the commands into your terminal window. “I know, you can’t do that in Windows!”

After executing the commands, you will have to restart the targeted application for the changes to take effect. If it’s a Finder or Dock tweak, the easiest way is to execute the appropriate command in terminal as follow:

• killall Finder
• killall Dock

To revert the changes you’ve made, just change the keywords of the command you executed as listed below:

• YES to NO and vice versa
• TRUE to FALSE and vice versa
• 0 to 1 and vice versa

Commands

1. Quick Look X-Ray Folders

Enables you to preview files that are in a folder through a translucent folder icon when using Quick Look. The files will cycle through every 3 seconds when there are more than 5 files in the folder.

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1; killall Finder

Quick Look

2. Mouse-Over Highlights In Stacks
Items in your stacks that are in grid view will be highlighted when you hover your mouse cursor over them.

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES; killall Dock

Grid

Fan

3. Make List View Look Like Grid View
Change list view to closely mimic grid view in your stacks.

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES; killall Dock

List

4. One-Window Dictionary
I like using the contextual menu to look up words when browsing the internet as oppose to using Command+Control+D^[1] because of the keys being too close together, but since Snow Leopard, every time I look up a new word Dictionary just keeps opening new windows and that annoys the hell out of me. For those of you who are like me, the following command will force Dictionary to use only 1 window.

defaults write com.apple.Dictionary ProhibitNewWindowForRequest -bool TRUE

5. QuickTime Remaining In Full Screen
Whenever watching a movie on my Mac I occasionally get IM messages and when I Command+Tab^[2] to view the message, my QuickTime window will always exits full screen, which isn’t what I want it to do. To keep QuickTime always in full screen execute the following command.

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGFullScreenExitOnAppSwitch 0

6. Auto Play QuickTime Videos
By default QuickTIme does not auto play a video file when you open it. To enable auto play upon opening a video file execute the following command.

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

7. Automatically Turn On Closed Captioning and Subtitles
Sometimes when playing a movie, I like to turn on subtitles because let’s face it, not all actors and actresses have been taught to speak clearly in theater school. But always having to click the menu to check if there are subtitles is just troublesome. The following command will automatically turn on closed captioning and subtitles when playing a video if they are available.

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGEnableCCAndSubtitlesOnOpen 1

8. Address Book Debug Menu
The debug menu in Address Book enables some extra options, with one of them being able to toggle contact picture reflections; But the menu is hidden. To show the debug menu, run the following command.

defaults write com.apple.AddressBook ABShowDebugMenu -bool TRUE

Address Book

Reference

^[1] Command+Control+D allows quick definition look-ups within Cocoa applications such as Safari, Mail, Adium, etc.

^[2] Command+Tab allows you to switch between running applications, just like CTRL+Tab on a Windows machine.