This trick was posted by Stephen Radford (via Steven Troughton-Smith) a few days ago and since it’s going to be a while before I upgrade to Mojave, I need to record this for posterity…
defaults
Make macOS Dock Icons Transparent When an App Is Hidden
When you launch an app, it shows up in your Dock with a small dot underneath it, but there is no way (by default) to tell which app is hidden. You can, however, enable a hidden setting which makes the hidden app’s icon transparent, like Tweetbot and Ulysses in the screenshot above.
OS X — Change the Number of Icons Per Row/Column in Launchpad
I personally don’t use Launchpad, which is designed to make it easier to manage your apps iOS-style. Instead, I prefer to use Spotlight or the Dock to launch whatever I may need at the moment, but I know that some people swear by it. The default grid is a 7×5 array of icons, with the options of putting them in folders. This can be changed.
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Tweetbot for Mac — Open URLs Directly, Skipping t.co Links
Tweetbot for Mac has a ‘super secret’ setting which allows the skipping of the t.co link redirects, making for a much better and faster UX. The t.co links have been barely working for me lately, which is frustrating, so I decided to try it. You should enable this too — it really makes things faster.
OS X – Choose Between the Character Accents Popup
and Key Repeat When Holding Down a Key
Apple introduced an iOS feature to OS X some years back changing the behaviour of the keyboard. Traditionally, if a key was held down, the letter would start repeating itself on screeeeeeeeeen. This was changed to a popup which displayed various non-standard characters. I was never a fan of this, even though it does indeed simplify finding accented letters. This cannot be changed through System Preferences, but a quick visit to the Terminal can sort things out.