Make your Mac go taster, with a
little help from Terminal.
If you’ve tried everything else and still
want to make your Mac run faster, roll up your sleeves, crack your knuckles and
prepare to take on a challenge. The Terminal is your direct portal to OS X’s
kernel. There are no menus or tick Poxes to negotiate here. We’re back to
old-school computing, setting up configuration options at the command prompt.
Scary? not really.
Use Terminal to speed up Mountain Lion
In many cases, you can access features you
won’t find anywhere else in the system. In others, it’s faster to tap out a
quick command than negotiate your way through obscure control panels, menus and
dialogue boxes.
If you’ve never used the Terminal before,
you’ll find it in the Utilities folder in Applications. It’s easier still to
find in Launchpad, in the Utilities group. Once you open it, you’ll be faced
with a blinking cursor, a blank window and a lot of possibilities. To
cut-and-paste these commands, see www.macworld.com.au/70147.
Warning: These commands are pretty
straightforward, but we always recommend you back up your Mac before delving
into Terminal.
1. Turn off the Dashboard
Turn off the Dashboard
You can turn off Dashboard widgets so they
don’t use CPU cycles even when they’re not active. Type the command:
-defaults write com.apple.dashboard
mcx-disabled
-boolean YES
-killall Dock
2. Bring it back
Bring it back
If you find that you’re really missing your
widgets, use the command:
-defaults write com.apple.dashboard
mcx-disabled
-boolean NO
killall Dock
The ‘killall’ command at the end resets the
Dock, by the way.
3. 2D Dock
2D Dock
To squeeze every Nanosecond of speed out of
your Mac, you can revert to the old-style 2D Dock. Use the command:
-defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass
-boolean YES
killall Dock
To reverse the process, replace ‘YES’ with
'NO’
4. Disable automatic window animations
Disable automatic window animations
It takes a fraction of a tick for windows
to animate when you open and close them. A portion of a second you can claw
back with:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain
NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled
-bool NO
Replace ‘NO’ with ‘YES’ will bring your
animations back.
5. Rebuild your Font Cache
Rebuild your Font Cache
If you install and delete lots of different
fonts, then your Font Cache can become corrupt and sluggish over time. You can
clear and rebuild the Font Cache at start-up by issuing the following command:
atsutil databases -remove
Replace ‘-remove’ with ‘-removeUser’ to
only clear the current user’s cache.
6. Switch screenshot format
Switch screenshot format
If you use the shortcut keys to take screenshots
(^-Shift-3) - the default file type is png. You can change it by entering:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg Your Mac also supports bmp, tif
and gif - all you need to do is swap ‘jpg’ for one of those.
7. Add ‘Quit Finder’
Add ‘Quit Finder’
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get out
of system slowdown by rebooting the Finder? Enter this command at the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES kill all Finder
You can now simply choose ‘Quit Finder’
from the Finder menu.
8. Plain emails
Plain emails
Set all mails to display with plain text in
the preview pane by entering this at the Terminal: defaults write
com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE
Restart Mail and HTML has gone. Revert by
replacing ‘TRUE’ with ‘FALSE’.
9. Recent applications
Recent applications
This command creates a Dock Stack that
lists the last few apps used, defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others
-array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”;
}’
Don’t forget to refresh the Dock using
killall Dock.
10. Empty Trash
Empty Trash
You know when you empty Trash and OS X asks
you whether you really want to empty it, wasting valuable pizza-eating time?
This command will let you delete files without OS X nagging you about it:
defaults write com.apple.finder WarnOnEmptyTrash -bool false
11. Run maintenance scripts
Run maintenance scripts
OS X is highly optimized, running its own
clean-up routines on a scheduled basis. But it does no harm to run these
manually though. Use:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
You’ll be prompted to enter your password
and all maintenance scripts will run straight away.
12. Autocomplete
Autocomplete
To finish off, here are a few tips that
make using the Terminal a bit faster. Firstly, want to complete paths quickly
when typing in the terminal? Hit Tab and OS X does it for you. An even quicker
way to add full paths to commands is to drag and drop folders from the Finder
directly into the Terminal window.
13. Terminal anywhere
Terminal anywhere
You can add a command to the contextual
menu that opens the Terminal at the folder you’re currently navigating in the
Finder.
Open System Preferences and click on
Keyboard. Choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and Select ‘Services’. You’ll see a
full list of add-on commands.
14. Use the menu
Use the menu
Drill down the list to the ‘New Terminal at
Folder’ entry and tick the box to switch the feature on. Now, right-click
within any folder in the Finder and you’ll see the command at the bottom of the
contextual menu. Select it and the Terminal will pop up with the folder you
want to work in ready to access.
15. Look it up
Look it up
You know that OS X is built over a kernel
derived from UNIX, right? That means many standard UNIX commands work in the OS
X Terminal. The easiest way to find out what a command does and how it works is
to use the built-in manual, invoked with ‘man’. In Mountain Lion, you can
right-click and open the man page for any highlighted command that bit more
quickly.
Bonus tip: terminal replacement
When is Terminal not Terminal?
When it’s a Terminal replacement.
Total Terminal (free; totalterminal.binaryage.com)
is one of the leaders. Previously known as Visor, Total Terminal slides into
view when you hit a shortcut. It doesn’t replace the OS X Terminal. Rather, the
plugin adds features to your Mac’s terminal.apps - like color-coding, ‘copy on select’
and ‘paste on right-click’.
Then there’s iTerm2 (free; www.iterm2.com)
- a full replacement for Terminal that focuses on better performance and extra
features. Those include a split-screen interface, mouse less copying, built-in
search and a 256-colour interface. If you’re serious about unlocking the power
of your Mac with Terminal commands, either app is worth the download.
