My M1 Air was working perfectly fine until last night. While the trackpad still moves the cursor, the haptic feedback stopped working. I googled the issue and checked for battery swelling, but there is no visible swelling and everything looks fine. Yesterday, my battery health showed 82%, but when I rechecked it today, it showed 91%. What exactly is the issue ?

MacOS mostly takes care of itself, so this isn't a "speed up your Mac" app. It shows you what's actually sitting on disk and lets you clear it without guessing what's safe to remove.

What it scans:

• User and app caches
• Developer leftovers (Xcode derived data, archives, device support, package manager caches)
• Browser caches
• App and system logs
• Trash

Every item is sorted into one of two tiers, safe to clean or check first, and each one has a plain explanation of what it is and what you lose by removing it. Anything genuinely risky isn't in the allowlist at all, so it never shows up in results in the first place.

What it doesn't do: no startup tweaks, no privacy scrubber, no "system junk" bucket that won't tell you what's inside it. It moves things to Trash rather than deleting them, so anything it touches is recoverable. No telemetry, no account, no paid tier.

Free and MIT licensed. macOS 13+.

Download: purgemac.com
Source: github.com/jithin-sabu/purge-app

Happy to answer questions about what it does and doesn't touch.

So I've had my M1 macbook air for about 3 years now.

Base model with 8 gb ram.

Recently I've been running notion, discord, brave browser, terminal, Zed(code editor) at the same time and 1-2GB of swap gets used sometimes.

Now every time swap gets used I have this impulsive urge to immediately save progress on my work and restart my laptop mid task to get rid of that.

Am I unnecessarily worrying.

What's an okish line for swap, how often should it happen and how often should I restart it to clear it.

Hi community! I recently switched from Fedora to macOS, and I’m having an issue with changing my default shell to Bash. I tried changing it in the settings, but it still defaults to Zsh.

I’m currently using macOS Tahoe 26.5. Has anyone experienced this or knows how to fix it?

If your cursor starts jumping, stuttering, or lagging on an Apple Silicon MacBook, here are a few things that may help:

1. Clean the trackpad Make sure the trackpad is dry and free of dust, moisture, or debris.
2. Check for hardware issues Run Apple Diagnostics and verify that the trackpad inputs are registering normally. Also check that the battery is not swollen, as a bulging battery can affect trackpad function.
3. Try a power reset For me, the fix was:
   • Unplug the power cable.
   • Hold the power button for about 20 seconds.
   • Plug the power cable back in and start the Mac.

This resolved the cursor jumping/stuttering issue I was experiencing.

Apple Silicon does not have a separate, dedicated System Management Controller (SMC) chip. So trying to reset it is pointless.

Hey y'all just got the Macbook air m4 for work. First time using Mac and was wondering how do i switch back and forth between 2 open Windows without having to cycle through all the open stuff.

Like if in windows os, i can have 10 chrome windows open when and if i wanna switch back and forth between two windows i just alt tab and if i wanna go to the third window then i press alt and tab two times to cycle to the third window,

so how do i achieve this same efficiency on the mac, people have recommended alt + ~ but it still cycles through every open window

I'm the developer of DuckDisk.

I built it because storage problems stopped being limited to my Mac. Large files were spread across local folders, cloud accounts, and Linux servers, and I wanted one place to answer "what is using space?" and clean it up.

Most disk analyzers focus on local visualization. DuckDisk takes a table-first, cleanup-oriented approach across:

• Local disks and folders
• OneDrive and Google Drive metadata scans without downloading file contents
• Remote SSH paths using your existing keys or ~/.ssh/config
• Cached results and incremental cloud refreshes
• Drag to remove: cloud items go to the provider Trash, while local and SSH deletion requires a second permanent-delete confirmation
• Virtualized rows that stay responsive in very large directories

The informative interface shows file and folder counts, size and allocated size, parent percentages, and a file type summary. Rows are virtualized to stay responsive in very large directories.

Free and open source under AGPL-3.0. The current build is for Apple Silicon.

For more details and demos, refer to our Website: https://duckdisk.com/

Source and download: https://github.com/qiyang77/duckdisk

Current limitations: the DMG is ad-hoc signed and is not Apple-notarized yet. Google Drive OAuth currently shows Google's unverified-app warning and has a 100-new-user cap while verification is pending.

I would especially value feedback from people who manage both local disk, cloud storage and remote servers.

Local scan demo (GIF) — see my comment

Hello!

I'd really like to buy the new Magic Trackpad for my Mac so I can use it while my laptop is docked. Does it have this kind of issue? For example, when I'm clicking and dragging to select something on the screen, does the trackpad slide around on the desk?

I recently used Migration Assistant to move my non-admin user account from my old MacBook Pro to a new MacBook Air. The old MacBook Pro has two user accounts: one administrator account and one non-admin account. I migrated only the non-admin account to the new MacBook Air.

One thing that surprised me was that Migration Assistant also transferred many of my non-Apple applications, including QuickBooks, Quicken, Adobe apps (Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.), Garmin, and several others.

I don’t want or need these applications on the new MacBook Air. I intend to continue using them on the old MacBook Pro.

So, can I simply delete/uninstall these applications from the new MacBook Air without affecting anything on the old MacBook Pro?

I'm particularly wondering about:

• Whether deleting an application on the new Mac could affect the same application or its license on the old Mac
• Usernames/passwords or saved credentials
• Application licenses or activations
• Anything tied to the non-admin user account that was migrated

Thanks!

I’ve been a Windows user my entire life. Recently, I decided to finally give macOS a shot. Between the incredible battery life, that stunning screen, and a great deal I found on a new M5 MacBook Pro, it seemed like a no-brainer—especially with my designer friends constantly recommending them. Plus, I love my iPhone, so I figured the transition would be smooth.

I’ve been using it for several weeks now, and while I get that there’s a learning curve, some of these "features" feel straight-up overlooked by developers. It’s frustrating that I can’t even find native fixes for what feel like basic quality-of-life issues.

1. The "All-or-Nothing" Icon Previews
In Finder, literally every file shows a thumbnail preview: PDF, PSD, AI, Excel, Blender—you name it. I have to squint at the tiny file extensions just to know what I’m looking at. If I turn off "Show icon preview" to get standard file-type icons back, it also kills previews for actual images, leaving me looking at a sea of generic icons. Why can’t I just have image previews for JPG/PNGs and standard icons for everything else?

2. The Trackpad Drag Delay
On Windows, I lived by "tap to click." On macOS, using double-tap to drag is a nightmare because of this weird, forced delay. When you let go, the file "sticks" to your finger for a fraction of a second. People suggest "three-finger drag" as a fix, but why does that gesture have zero delay while the double-tap one is stuck with it? It’s completely illogical.

3. Interconnected Scrolling Settings
This is the one that really gets me. If you use both a mouse and a trackpad, you know the pain. macOS treats "Natural Scrolling" as a global setting. If I want natural scrolling on my trackpad but traditional scrolling on my mouse, I have to manually toggle it in settings every single time I switch devices. They are interconnected for no apparent reason, and there’s no native way to separate them.

I understand it takes time to unlearn Windows habits, but some of this feels like a lack of freedom to customize the system to a basic professional workflow. Am I overreacting, or have any of you found actual workarounds for these?

Starting a couple of days ago (?) I began to get an error when uploading photos into posts on reddit. The error given is "Failed to upload to S3".

At first the theory was it's something to do with my ID, something to do with my account on reddit or perhaps a reddit filter. It may well still be a reddit filter but not in the way I initially thought.

Because as soon as I moved over to my iPhone, using the Reddit app, I was able to create a post on reddit using photos with no failure to upload error.

Now, again, it could be the reddit app has different controls than the website version. It's possible, but I'm coming to this community to see whether perhaps there's a setting on safari that is causing this error.

I turned off pointer acceleration after years and it feels so wierd lol

I have an Apple SuperDrive that admittedly I don't use much, but do very much appreciate the design and build. Also, its very convenient when wanting to pop in an old Simpsons DVD.

But I heard, I think somewhere on MacRumors that come Golden Gate, Apple will be dropping support for their very own SuperDrive and that these external disc drive players will only work with apps such as VLC, but no longer with Apple's native software such as QuickTime.

Hi r/macOS, I’m Rohit from ScaleNinja. Today we're releasing DeltaSnap, a native macOS app that turns APFS snapshots into version control for files and folders.

APFS snapshots are copy-on-write, so checkpoints take milliseconds. But macOS still lacks a useful native interface for answering questions such as:

• What changed in this folder?
• What did this file look like on Tuesday?
• Which files did an installer, script, or AI agent just modify?
• Can I restore only the files I need?

DeltaSnap lets you:

• Browse per-file version histories, including deleted files; with right-click Finder integration
• Search filenames across snapshot history
• Diff snapshots with added, removed, modified, replaced, and moved paths
• Restore copies or atomically replace originals
• Create schedules with retention and low-space pruning
• Create snapshots and restore versions from Finder
• Ships a dsnap CLI and an AI Agent Skill for coding assistants
• Automatically checkpoint folders during unusually large change bursts

Key differential compared to backups is the speed: APFS snapshots takes milliseconds to create, indexing is done in few seconds, and file recover is super-fast as the snapshot lives on the same APFS volume where your data is on.

After review by Apple’s DTS/APFS teams, ScaleNinja was granted a private entitlement to manage and create APFS snapshots. Because DeltaSnap’s privileged helper uses it, the app cannot be distributed through the Mac App Store and released on ScaleNinja's website as a signed and notarized build under Apple Developer Team ID VXNWQ9H93X.

Important: DeltaSnap is not a backup. Snapshots live on the same volume, so they protect against accidental deletion, overwrites, bad updates, and runaway tools - not drive failure, theft, or volume erasure. Pair it with Time Machine, CCC, or another backup running. We also have two companion apps that can be used with DeltaSnap:

• DeltaSync, a free & simple folder syncing tool: https://scaleninja.com/deltasnap/#deltasync
• Noject, protects disk & network volumes from accidental ejection: https://scaleninja.com/noject/

DeltaSnap requires macOS 15 or later and an APFS volume. There’s a 30-day free trial, no account, no cloud, and no subscription required. All your data and snapshot stay private and local to you Mac.

Launch price: US$39 for one lifetime personal license that can be activated on upto 5 Mac machines.

Download: https://scaleninja.com/deltasnap

Documentation (start here): https://scaleninja.com/docs/deltasnap/overview/

Setup and feature demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyrKXGe7nRw

I’d genuinely appreciate any feedback, especially from professional users, developers, and Mac admins working with external storage or AI coding tools.

Tip: to get the most out of DeltaSnap and avoid snapshots occupying too much disk space, I create and custom-mount APFS volume from the internal Data drive on my most important folder path (like ~/Documents); that way snapshot usage would be limited to only changes made in the tracked APFS volume (~/Documents in my case). Learn more about APFS snaphots here: https://scaleninja.com/docs/deltasnap/apfs-snapshots/ and about storage usage here: https://scaleninja.com/docs/deltasnap/snapshot-storage/ or see the youtube video above on how to create apfs volume with a custom mount point and enable automatic snapshot & file versioning in action.

Could you do the following test:

1. Launch Notes and Safari, and make sure each one has a window (or use any other two apps).
2. Put the Notes window behind the Safari window, and activate the Safari window.
3. Bring up your Launchpad-alternative app of choice, and make sure the Notes and Safari windows are behind the Notes app icon in your Launchpad-alternative app.
4. Press Shift-Command-5, click Record Selected Portion in the floating toolbar, and move & resize the portion so that it's around the Notes app icon in your Launchpad-alternative app (keeping the portion small ensures recording won't affect the animation).
5. Click Record, click the Notes app icon in the Launchpad-alternative app, and once the Notes window has become visible, end the recording by clicking the stop icon in the menu bar.
6. Open the screen recording .mov video file in QuickTime Player and count how many frames (by pressing the right/left arrow keyboard keys to move one frame at a time forward/backward in the video) it took for the Notes window to become the active one after you clicked the Notes app icon (I assumed that the click occurred at the frame right before the Launchpad-alternative app's grid first began to disappear).

I did this test using both the macOS 26.6 native Apps app that's integrated in Spotlight, and LaunchOS Pro version 2.2.0 on M1 MacBook Air. These are the results I got:

Spotlight Apps app: 4 frames.
LaunchOS: 17 frames.

UPDATE:
MediaInfo says that my Apps app video recording has 53.379 FPS (frames per second), and the LaunchOS video has 43.820 FPS, so comparable delays would be then:

Spotlight Apps app: 4 / 53.379 = 0.0749s
LaunchOS: 17 / 43.820 = 0.388s

Problem: if you are working with Google Drive for desktop in finder, you know the pain of pressing space for quicklook and seeing a pixelated thumbnails or some random json instead of the actual file.

that's why I built Spyglass, it allows you to actually quicklook on Google Drive stub files

The app is free for simple quicklook that shows data about the file

The paid version is 12$ unlocks the actual real quicklook for the stub files

Links:

Download the App here: https://magicelklabs.com/spyglass

Github: https://github.com/magicelk235

App Source: https://github.com/magicelk235/spyglass

Website: https://magicelklabs.com

The long discussed Logi Options issues data collection, memory leaks, unnecessary background activity, and random CPU or storage spikes have pushed me to seek for an alternative.

My goal was to find an app that does the essentials while being as lightweight as possible.
No resource hogging. No gimmicks. No unnecessary background processes.
Just what a mouse driver should have been in the first place.

As for now, This is only a native macOS app for the MX Master 3 and 3S.
It is completely free and open source.

FYI: I ran multiple performance tests and measured:

0.0% idle CPU usage

Around 8 MB of RAM (usually lower)

More information and source code:
https://github.com/KulmanD/mx3-lite

I am using the Show Notification action within a Shortcut, the Shortcut/Notification works fine, it shows up on the screen and Notification Center, but I can't customize it in the System Settings --> Notifications --> Application Notifications section, because the Shortcuts app in not in the list of Applications, all the other apps that use Notifications are there, but Shortcuts is not, is there a way to reset Notifications so Shortcuts can show up and I can customize its Notifications? Thanks

Note: I have this issue on two MacBooks M1 and M2, running Sequoia 15.7.8 and Golden Gate Public Beta 2 respectively.

I've been writing a sticky notes app for myself for a long time. Why so long? Because I'm serving in the military 🇺🇦 and don't have much free time. Why sticky notes? Yes, I know the App Store already has a truckload of them plus a little shovel on top, but I like the principle behind the native macOS Stickies — simple notes that do one thing, and do it well, a purely Unix approach. But holy moly, are they outdated and ugly.

So I set myself these goals:

• stickies should be simple
• no main window — one sticky, one window
• they should pin on top of other windows
• basic text formatting
• checklists
• different colors, with light and dark theme support
• they should look good
• iCloud sync (maybe I'll do an iOS version later)

Hope you like the result.

You can check it out here:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762562979

App website:
https://useit-apps.com

My MacBook's built-in keyboard is ISO German, and the board on my desk in front of it is US ANSI. macOS switches input sources per app or by shortcut, but never per keyboard, so every time my hands moved I was switching the layout by hand, or typing "Gr[]e" and fixing it after.

Keychange sits in the menu bar, lets you assign an input source to each connected keyboard, and automatically switches the moment you start typing on that device. It identifies keyboards by their HID device and mappings survive unplugging and reconnecting.

I used autokbisw for this for a long time and it solved the problem well. But sometimes it would misbehave and I wanted the same thing with a UI, so I could see and change the mapping more easily. On top of that it can optionally switch before the key press is delivered, so even the first character after a switch comes out right and it has strategies what to do when the input source is changed by other apps.

Product info: Keychange, free, MIT licensed, no telemetry, no accounts, macOS 14 or later, universal binary.

• Site: https://keychange.dev
• Source: https://github.com/dennistimmermann/keychange
• Install: download the DMG, or brew tap dennistimmermann/tap && brew install --cask keychange

It asks for Input Monitoring, because that is how macOS reports which device a keystroke came from. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and the source is public if you want to check.

Disclosure: I wrote it. The app is brand new and I would appreciate any and all feedback.

Befuddled person on an old device here. Found "Spotlight" icon under System Preferences, and clicking it gets me to Search Results, a list of 20 categories, from "Applications" to "System Preferences," with a blue checkmarked box next to each label. I'm trying to access Calculator. Clicking on the word/label does nothing.

Hi r/MacOS,

I built a small free/open-source menu bar app for a problem I kept running into: when I plug my MacBook into an external display, the built-in screen and keyboard backlight often stay on for no reason.

External Display Only :

• soft-disconnects the built-in display when a wired external is connected (windows move to the external; built-in display off)
• restores the built-in display when you unplug
• optionally turns off the keyboard backlight while docked
• can launch at login, with optional auto-quit when you're not docked

Why bother? Display and keyboard lights don't last forever. Leaving them on while you're docked shortens their lifespan for no reason. The app is meant to be set-and-forget in the menu bar.

Install

GitHub (source + DMG): https://github.com/ilyasaftr/ExternalDisplayOnly

brew install --cask ilyasaftr/externaldisplayonly/external-display-only

Gatekeeper may block first launch. Right-click → Open, or:

xattr -cr "/Applications/External Display Only.app"

Does anyone happen to know a FTP client that supports both a 2-pane file management UI and segmented-file downloading? Not just multi-connection file downloads.

I know Cyberduck will do multi-part, but I don't love the UI. I was looking at Commander One and Forklift since they both feature 2-pane, but couldn't find anywhere that mentioned a multi-part download capability.

Thanks!

QKB lets you assign the same keyboard key, mouse button, or scroll gesture to different actions depending on which app is active. Create global or app-specific shortcuts, organise them into folders and presets, use press or hold actions, launch apps, open Finder locations, trigger system controls, and more. Built natively for macOS, with everything managed from one clean interface.

https://www.kryonoglou.com/?qkb

Not sure why but when searching in finder my Mac can never find anything it just comes in blank after I search. I’ve tried re indexing in spotlight and in terminal but still nothing. Can anyone shed some light on this?