Learning More About Your Computer Part 1

Hey guys, this is Matthew21, and I realized that some Mac users aren't as comfortable with their computers as PC users are. Something might get done, but it might not get done correctly on their Mac. On a PC, it seems like there are fewer options, so things go a little better.

So, I want to help all of you get a little more comfortable with how your Mac works and, um, just get into it a little bit. First, I'm going to start out with the basics that probably all the smart people who watch our videos know. Then I’m going to get into the more advanced stuff that maybe, um, people who just want to play around a little bit would be interested in knowing.

So, first of all, let’s get started. One of the things I noticed older people doing, like maybe 40- or 50-year-olds, is they drag windows around by accident and then they don’t know what they’re doing. For instance, I have this window open, right? But my grandpa, he accidentally dragged this window over here and now he doesn’t know how to get it back.

For those of you who really don’t know what you’re doing, if you click on any gray part of the window that’s about this color, you can drag the window around. I’m pretty positive you all know that though, so sorry if I just wasted a few seconds of your life.

Another thing that I noticed is that people don’t really know where their files are, and this is a more advanced thing. Basically, my friend, I was watching a video that he made, and I happened to notice that when he’s like, "You want to go to your home folder," he closed this places thing so his home directory wasn’t in the list. He just clicked on Macintosh HD, and the file he was looking for had downloaded in Macintosh HD.

So, first of all, I’ll point out that there’s a tab here called Places. If you open it up, there’s this list of things, and right here’s my home folder, here’s Applications, and here’s Desktop. Okay, so I will just point out right now this is still pretty basic stuff. So if you don’t know this, then you're really learning something you should know anyway.

Also, in Macintosh HD, Macintosh HD is really slash. The way it all works is the computer—it’s the root of everything—starts out at slash, and then it goes down directories. Like if there’s a Users directory in Macintosh HD, then it’s slash Users. Inside of that, if there’s a directory called MacHeads 101, it would be slash Users slash MacHeads.

So basically, if you click on Macintosh HD and slash, there are a few folders in Macintosh HD: System, you’ll see Applications, you’ll see Users, you’ll see Library, you may or may not see Developer. But basically, Users—when you open up the Users folder—here are all the users for all the different folders. Here’s a folder for the user I created; it’s my hidden user. Um, I forgot to hide it though. Here’s the MacHeads 101 user folder, and of course your home folder looks like a home to you. This is your home folder right here. So right now, I’m in slash Users slash Alex.

Now in your home folder, there’s another folder called Desktop, and inside of that is everything that’s located on your desktop. For instance, if I just scroll up, here’s Documents, MacKinzona1, subscribe to. Um, and that’s everything that’s on my desktop other than hard drives. Hard drives will appear if you click on the left here.

But anyway, so basically, right here, if for some reason this Places thing isn’t here, then you can just click on Macintosh HD, open up Users, open up your home folder, and then here it is. There’s a folder in here called Documents, a folder called Desktop, a folder called, um, Music—you know—a folder called Downloads, everything. Pretty much, if you open up Desktop—like I said—that’s your desktop.

So, that’s that. Um, so if you ever find yourself in a situation where you can’t find the file, then luck chances are that if you click on Macintosh HD, open up Users, Alex, and then find the file, if it’s on your Desktop, open up Desktop, then yeah.

Okay, another thing is just a simple keystroke. When you click on an icon and right-click on an icon, all these options are down here in the right-click, but there are two other ways to get most of those options. You can go up to File, and this has a lot of this stuff. If you notice on the right-hand side here, there are keystrokes. So, for instance, Close Window is Command W, Get Info is Command I.

So if I click on a file and press Command I, the window for info comes up. Also, if I can just take a look, there’s a keystroke for practically everything. So if I want to open a new window, I just press Command N. Here’s my new window. Say I want to go to another folder, I just press Shift Command G and type a new folder.

Also in Macintosh HD, if you look, there’s a folder called Applications, and applications has all your basic programs that are installed. There’s another folder in here called Utilities, and inside of that is Terminal. Okay, so that’s all with the file system and the few keystrokes.

Another thing is if you have Leopard, then you don’t always have to drag windows around just to get what you want. For instance, I have this window—it’s like a Firefox window—open full screen on my computer, practically full screen anyway. And I don’t want to have to say I want to get to an icon on my desktop. I don’t really have to drag it like this to get on my desktop.

I mean, some people think you do, and they spend all their time just dragging it. Of course, you can minimize it by clicking the minimize button, but that’s wasted time because now you have to move your mouse back here.

So a really simple way to do this is switch Spaces. If you go into System Preferences, you can enable Spaces. You just click on Expose and Spaces and then click on the Spaces tab and then check Enable Spaces.

Basically, I’ll check Show Spaces as a menu bar. You can select how many rows and columns you have, and then the key to activate Spaces to switch between spaces is Control and the arrow keys. I’ll make it Command and the arrow keys, and to switch directly to a space, Control and a number of the space.

So right here I have nine spaces, and they go like this. What a space is basically, if you press F8, which is my key to activate Spaces, all nine spaces come up, and you can click any space, move it around, drag windows off of one space to another. Okay, pretty cool, right?

You can also select another space, and now since I set my keystroke to be Command arrow key to switch between spaces, now I just press Command left to move here, Command right to move here, Command down to move here. You can move all around your different spaces. I like having nine spaces; it’s a good number.

This way you could have tons of applications open at one time. Another convenient thing is Expose. Right now, if you set Show Desktop, I select that F11, Application Windows. I’m just going to keep that. Nothing in All Windows.

So basically now when I press F11, all my windows move out of the way and I can open another window. I can open any Finder window without the windows moving back. But if I open another app, they move back. So I’ll just press F11 again to move this back.

Um, if I set this to be F13, maybe. Actually, I don’t have an F13 key. I’m sure there’s some keystroke to get there. Then it lets you click on a window: All Windows. I’m just going to set this to be F12, and this is going to be none.

So now if I press F12, I get to select any window. I don’t really like this, so that’s window management. So that’s actually convenient. Another thing is if you press Command Tab, you can conveniently switch between any of your applications. Command Shift Tab always is the opposite of Tab. So if I’m here and I press Tab to move to this Google search bar, I can press Shift Tab to move back.

Okay, that’s cool. Another thing is that people might not notice is in the Dock. If you have Tiger, then there will be a black arrow, and if you have Leopard, there will be a little spotlight under every application that’s open.

So even if I have Firefox open, I just close the window. There’s still the Firefox menu at the top, and here it’s still open. Then if I click on Finder, it goes away. So to really quit it, you can go up to the application menu and click Quit, then the application name, or you can just press Command Q. That will quit most applications.

So I’ll just press Command Q, and Firefox will truly close on me. So if you would like to learn more, um, about your computer and how it works, please check out part two of this video.

So thanks for watching Mac Kids 101. Please subscribe to our videos; it supports us. And goodbye.