Technology

Well, the moment you want to start being a power user on the Mac, you have to learn a few common menu items or their keyboard shortcuts. This is by design because Apple doesn't want to make it easy to mistakenly mess up your computer, and even with things being this way by default with all these restrictions, you'd find that people still find ways to break it. It's stunning.

Knowing that, it's understandable that some settings would be required to be tweaked if a power user were to use the system. You can hit cmd+, to open the settings, customize your side bar, and add desktop icons for any connected drives. To jump to a certain directory, you would use the Go > Go to Folder or shift+cmd+G to type in your location. This works for hidden files too, but it may be easier to simply use the terminal when working with hidden files such as these.

To move up a directory when you're caught in the middle of a file tree, you can use cmd+up arrow, or use Go > Enclosing Folder. Alternatively, you could just start using the column view, which is one of the great features I tend to shout out the Finder for in the first place. It makes it incredibly easy to navigate deeply nested directories.

You can also use cmd+j to change the view settings in any folder, and it will remember your preferences per each folder.

The cmd+i information pop-up is extremely useful and well laid out, easy to use, and intuitive.

You can tap the space bar after highlighting most files to view a preview of the file, including media files. This preview is also used in the gallery and column view in Finder, which can make working with media files much easier and simpler.

These are all things you learn when you spend a lot of time using macOS. Keyboard shortcuts obviously exist on everything, but with macOS they're pretty much required for power users.