Please share your hidden macOS features or tips and tricks

Solution 1:

In any Finder window or Open/Save dialog, you can hit ⌘⇧G (just '/' also works in Open/Save) to get a location bar from which you can directly type in the directory to go to. It even supports ~ for home and tab completion.

The Open/Save dialog has several other useful shortcuts:

⌘ R - Reveals the selected item in a new Finder window.
⌘ I - Info window shows for the selected item.
⌘ ⇧ > - Shows/Hides hidden files in the dialog
⌘ F - cursor jumps to the Find text field
/ or ~ - Opens a Go To Folder dialogue.
⌘ D or ⌘ ⇧ D - selects the ~/Desktop folder as a destination
⌘ ⌥ L - selects ~/Downloads folder as a destination
⌘ ⇧ O - selects ~/Documents folder as a destination
⌘ ⌥ S - Shows/Hides sidebar
⌘ . or esc - Cancels and closes the dialog window

Solution 2:

In the terminal, you can pipe the output of any command to pbcopy to copy it to the system clipboard. You can also paste from the system clipboard using pbpaste, and pipe that to another command or write the value directly to a file:

Copy a string: echo "ohai im in ur clipboardz" | pbcopy

Copy the HTML of StackOverflow.com: curl "http://stackoverflow.com/" | pbcopy

Open a new buffer in VIM, initialized to the content of the clipboard: pbpaste | vim -

Save the contents of the clipboard directly to a file: pbpaste > newfile.txt

Solution 3:

I always find the ⌘+⇧+4, space (you must press space at the end otherwise it doesn't work) command is really useful, and one that a lot of people don't know you can do. Upon pressing space, you get a large camera icon for your cursor, and it allows you to take a screenshot just of the highlighted window. The nice thing is that OS X preserves the window drop shadow, with full alpha transparency. So when you paste the images into other documents, they look fab.

More screenshot magic from 3rdparty.

Screenshot Secrets via: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2006/01/01/mac-os-x-screenshot-secrets.html:

⌘+⇧+3 Capture entire screen and save as a file
⌘+ctrl+⇧+3 Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard
⌘+⇧+4 Capture dragged area and save as a file
⌘+ctrl+⇧+4 Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard
⌘+⇧+4 then space Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file
⌘+ctrl+⇧+4 then space Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard
Another useful trick is to hold space while drawing a capture area to reposition it.
Another trick is to hold option while drawing a capture area, to resize the area in all directions, instead of just the one corner you're dragging.
For fine-tuning on a certain axis, you can hold shift and the axis you next move in is the one you'll control.
Hit esc while capturing an area or window to exit capture mode.