“System Preferences is easy to use: open it, click here, click there — whoops, not there, over here instead… wait, where is that setting?” Sharon Zardetto reports for TidBITS. “My point is: System Preferences could be easier to use. And it is, once you know the details.”
“You don’t, for instance, need 30-plus items displayed when you use only a dozen of them regularly,” Zardetto reports. “You don’t always have to start with the full window, click a preference pane, and then click a tab to get where you want to be. And that Search field is more useful than you might expect.”
“Use Spotlight to jump directly to specific panes using only the keyboard. Command-Space bar is the system default for opening Spotlight, and typing the name of a pane — usually just the first few letters — gives you a list of options, including the preference pane,” Zardetto reports. “The first hit in the list is always highlighted, indicating that pressing Return will open it. I used this method for years, and often still do (I blame muscle memory), but it’s much quicker to use the next method.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s a lot of useful info here for those of us who tend to hunt and peck their way through System Prefs (we usually bang the whole thing open and begin typing in the Search field which works okay, but as Zardetto points out, it can be faster if you like).