Useful Mac Tweaks

Caps lock delay

One of the first things I noticed with my MacBook that really bothered me was the delay before I could turn on or off caps lock when I was typing. If you're typing quickly and want to quickly enable caps lock, you can't by default, and there's no user-facing way to disable this feature. However, there's a quick Terminal command you can use to turn it off.

hidutil property --set '{"CapsLockDelayOverride":0}'

That's it! Once you've run it, it's immediately in effect. Your caps lock delay will now be switched off, so you can type as fast as you want and switch caps lock on and off without getting frustrated about unnecessary delays to your typing.

Disable the changing file type warning

If you want to change the file type of a file, Finder will warn you that you shouldn't do that unless you know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing, but there's no way to tell Finder to stop telling me that whenever I do it. You can disable that feature though with a pretty simple Terminal command.

defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableExtensionChangeWarning -bool false

Once you've done that, the warnings will now go away, and you can change your file types whenever you want without Finder shouting at you and popping up with a warning each and every time.

Show file types at all times

If you want to see what type of files you have in a folder at all times, there's a basic terminal command you can run to enable just that.

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true

Paste that in your Terminal and hit enter. In Finder, you'll notice that all of your files have a file type at the end, now. You can use the same command but change "true" to "false" if you want to go back to the way things were.