This tip is a simple one, but I’m surprised to find people aren’t aware of the many ways to select text on your Mac. If you’re working on your Mac, you’re probably dealing with text. That means making selections for formatting, copying, pasting, and so on. This is basic stuff – click on the start of the text and drag to the end. Everyone who can ‘use a computer’ knows that, but on a Mac there are a few more ways to select.

• Double click a word to select the whole word. This usually goes from whitespace to whitespace around the word and its a great way quickly select a word when need to grab a name out of an email or a variable out of some code.

• Triple click to select a whole paragraph. Say you’re researching something online and come across the salient point on a web page. Just triple click the paragraph and you zip that off your team.

• Shift click to select a range. This one is good for selecting a lot of text that doesn’t fit on the screen, like a long web page or a big Word doc. Just click on the start point, scroll, scroll, scroll and shift click on the end point. Voila! The whole thing is selected.

• Extend the selection with shift click. If you have some text selected and shift-click again, the selection will extend to the point you’ve clicked. Sometimes you might not get all the text in the first swipe, so by shift clicking, you can extend the selection and get those missed letters.

Mac features like these selection tricks are the sorts of things that sometimes fall through the cracks. Long time Mac users have these actions embedded in muscle memory and can’t really say where they learned them. But they’re not very discoverable, so new users sometimes miss out on these deeper features. So spread the word! Tell your friends! Triple click all the things!

We got our first Mac in late 1999, around the time Jeff Goldblum was explaining that there is no step three. Fedex brought us a purple iMac DV, a gumdrop of a computer from a future with no floppy disks. That Mac was fantastic. I’ve lost count of the Macs that have come and gone since then, but they’ve all been magical in their own way. One thing I wanted to do with this blog is to explore some of the lesser known features of the Mac and show how they can make using a Mac even more efficient and delightful.

There are a lot of names given to apps on the Mac that really embrace the system. Some call them ‘Mac good citizens’ and some to say they’re Mac-assed Mac apps. With SonicBunny’s Mac apps, that’s the goal – to make a Mac-assed Mac app that feels right at home. And maybe just a little bit magical.

So let’s dig right in. I’ll start with a feature that I’ve used a number of times writing this post and that’s the word ‘look up’ feature. You can access this by right clicking on a word and choosing ‘Look up’ in the context menu. If you’re using a track pad, you can force click on a word to look it up. For example, if I ‘look up’ the word ‘marvels’, I get this pop up.

You get immediate access to the dictionary definition of the word as well as synonyms and antonyms. For me, this is incredibly useful in writing. Sometimes it’s helpful to double check the meaning of a word, but more commonly, I need help from the thesaurus when I’ve used the word ‘reliable’ three times in as many sentences. macOS has supported ‘look up’ for dictionary and thesaurus for a very long time, but in recent editions, Apple has added Siri Suggestions. In the case of ‘marvels’, I get extra tabs along the bottom for TV shows, images, and websites. Other search link to the Wikipedia and Apple Music. ‘Look up’ is also great reading the web in Safari. You can quickly look up a word or phrase without leaving the current page.

So that’s our first Pro Tip – use your track pad’s ‘force click’ to look up words quickly as you read and write on your Mac.