How to Customize Your Mac: A Guide for Advanced Users

How to Customize Your Mac: A Guide for Advanced Users – While Mac has been a truly famous choice among efficiency monstrosities, it isn’t precisely known for its customization. Along these lines, I swam through many applications to present to you this article on the most proficient method to tweak your Mac’s look. All things considered, there’s in no way like modifying your Mac to make it your own and add to its passionate esteem.

The presentation of System Integrity Protection (SIP) in EL Capitan put a nail in the pine box for a few striking customization applications like Flavor, which added new subjects to the Mac. While the majority of the applications have quit working with El Capitan and more up to date forms, there are different approaches to redo Mac. Along these lines, with no further ado, here are the 5 most ideal approaches to customize Mac:

1. Built-in Settings in macOS

To access the inbuilt settings, go to “System Preferences” from the menu bar on the top.

• The “General” tab allows you to select the appearance for Windows, highlight color, sidebar icon size and even enable a dark theme for the dock/menu bar.

• The “Desktop & Screensaver” tab allows you to set different wallpapers/screensaver and adds in some neat features like changing wallpapers automatically after a certain time, and changing wallpapers in random order.
• The“Dock” tab allows changing dock size, magnifications and several other dock-related options.

2. Create Desktop Widgets Using GeekTool

GeekTool is to macOS what Rainmeter is to Windows. It’s been around for years, has a bit of learning curve associated, but can produce some spectacular widgets for your macOS desktop. For starters, I’ll be showing you how to create a weather widget using GeekTool.

First of all, download and open GeekTool. For the weather widget, we’ll be using a custom HTML forecast embed by the folks over at Dark Sky. (h/t u/SarenSabertooth)

Drag the “Web” Geeklet from the GeekTool window to your desktop. A new window titled “Properties” should open and, and a transparent placeholder should be created on your desktop.

In the “Properties” window, under the text field beside URL, enter the following URL and press enter—

     http://forecast.io/embed/#lat=28.625093&lon=77.209473&name=New Delhi

You will need to replace the latitude and longitude to match your place using a service like iTouchmap. You can set the widget to refresh after a certain time in the “Properties” window. This is how it should look like after you are done with the setup.

So, there you have it. A clean and beautiful weather widget on your Mac’s desktop. If you’re looking to gain even more control like changing the font, color or the units, head over to Dark Sky’s website, which shows you all the custom parameters that the URL accepts.

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible with GeekTool. It can be used to create widgets that display the system information, CPU/RAM usage, calendars amongst hundreds of other things. Since it’s not possible to mention every widget, I’d recommend you to visit GeekTool’s official website, which lists some pretty cool widgets you can create. Once you get familiar with GeekTool’s functionality, you can personalize your Mac with some great widgets. Just don’t go overboard with it, as it might cause performance issues.

Use cDock to customize your Dock

The Dock is an integral part of your Mac. It’s where you can pin certain applications for faster access and access open documents (unless you become a keyboard ninja!).

cDock is a third-party solution that adds tons of settings to customize your dock. Before you can start using cDock, you’ll need to disable SIP on Mac if you’re running macOS El Capitan 10.11 or later. Once you’ve disabled SIP, you can continue to download cDock as usual and open it.

To begin with, it includes more than 20 themes and allows changing seemingly minor aspects of the dock like dock border, and color indicator lights.

Along with the looks, it can even change the dock’s behavior to only show active apps or dim hidden applications. Explore the tons of settings you can change with cDock here.

Remember that some of the settings will require you to “Restart Dock” for changes to take effect. It also includes an option to “Reset” settings under the “Dock” tab in case you want to restore to the original version.

Use mySIMBL to Customize Mac

mySIMBL uses plugins to inject custom code and thus add new features to existing apps for Mac. As you might have guessed, using mySIMBL requires you to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) on El Capitan or newer Macs. Once you’ve disabled SIP, download mySIBL. It supports macOS 10.9 and above.

In the “Discover” tab, you can find various plugins to enhance and add new functionality to your Mac. Installing a plugin is as easy as clicking on a plugin name and clicking “Install”.

Some of my favourite plugins are:

• Binventory: Adds an item count to the trash icon in the Dock.

• BlurFocus: Blurs all the open background windows.
• cleanHUD: Replaces Apple’s default volume/brightness control overlay to a much cleaner and minimal overlay.

• CustomNC: Customize Notification center alerts.

My only gripe with mySIMBL is that it is a bit buggy at times. Some of the tweaks will require you to restart your Mac. Some tweaks may not work on all versions of macOS, too. Nevertheless, mySIMBL is one such app which is worth giving a shot. Feel free to browse through other plugins and let me know which ones are your favorite.

5. Even More Ways to Customize Your Mac

Menu bar apps are dope on Mac, but some unnecessary apps can make your menu bar look cluttered. You can re-arrange/remove menu bar apps by dragging them around while holding down the CMD button on your keyboard. Note that this works with Apple’s system apps and some third-party applications only. If you’re looking for a more robust solution, you should grab a copy of Bartender 2.

You can change the app icons globally on your Mac without using any third-party apps.

Customize Mac Using These Ways

According to me, these were some of the best ways to customize your Mac interface. You can use a combination of tweaks to dramatically enhance the Mac interface. I tried the following options and apps in my MacBook Air running macOS Sierra and they worked out fine for me.