How to Customize Your Mac: A Guide for Advanced Users

While the Mac is a hugely popular option among productivity freaks, it’s not exactly known for its customization. That’s why I’ve flipped through dozens of apps to bring you this article on how to customize the look of your Mac. After all, there’s nothing like customizing your Mac to make it your own and add to its emotional value.

The introduction of System Integrity Protection (SIP) in EL Capitan is a nail in the coffin for many key customization applications such as: Flavor, which added new themes to Mac. While most of the apps have stopped working with El Capitan and newer, there are other ways to customize the Mac. So without further ado, Top 5 ways to customize Mac:

1. Built-in Settings in macOS

I can almost hear you exclaim that this guide is for advanced users only, and yet here I am showcasing the built-in settings. Sometimes we focus so much on the complexity part that we forget to get along with the simplicity. For example, among countless advanced Mac apps, it’s easy to forget useful built-in apps on Mac. If you think we’re still not on the same page, feel free to skip straight to the next section.

To access the internal settings “System Preferences” from the top menu bar.

• “GeneralThe ” tab lets you choose the appearance, highlight color, sidebar icon size for Windows, and even a dark theme for the dock/menubar.

• “Desktop and Screen SaverThe ” tab allows you to set different wallpapers/screensaver and adds some nice features like auto-switching wallpapers after a certain time and changing wallpapers in random order.

• this “Dock” tab allows to change slot size, magnifications and few other slot 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 a learning curve, but macOS can produce some amazing widgets for your desktop. For starters, I’ll show you how create weather widget Using GeekTool.

Before everything, download and open GeekTool. For the weather widget, we will use a custom HTML forecast placed by the folks at Dark Sky. (s/t u/SarenSabertooth)

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

Inside “Properties” window, enter the following URL under the text field next to URL and press enter—

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

you will need change latitude and longitude To match your location using a service like iTouchmap. You can set the widget to refresh after a certain time.Properties” window. It should look like this after you complete the installation—

So, here you are. A clean and beautiful weather widget on your Mac’s desktop. if you are looking Get more control like changing the font, color or unitsGo to Dark Sky’s Web sitedisplaying all 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 system information, CPU/RAM usage, calendars, among hundreds of other things. I recommend you to visit GeekTool as it is not possible to mention every widget. official websitelists some pretty cool widgets you can create. Once you get familiar with GeekTool’s functionality, you can customize your Mac with some great widgets. Do not overdo it as it can cause performance issues.

3. Use cDock to customize your Dock

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

cDock is a third-party solution. Adds tons of settings to customize your dock. If you’re running macOS El Capitan 10.11 or later, you must disable SIP on the Mac before you start using cDock. We covered how to disable SIP in one of our previous articles. After disabling SIP, you can continue. download cDock turn it on and off as usual.

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

Besides the view, the behavior of the dock can only be show active apps or dim hidden apps. Discover tons of settings you can change with cDock here.

Note that some settings will require you to “Restart the Dock“For the changes to take effect. Also “ResetSettings under ”DockIn case you want to restore the ” tab to the original version. For more dock customization, you can check out our detailed article on the same topic.

4. Use mySIMBL to Customize Mac

mySIMBL uses plugins to inject custom code and thus Add new features to existing apps for Mac. As you can imagine, to use mySIMBL you need to: Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) On El Capitan or newer Macs. After disabling SIP, Download mySIBL. Supports macOS 10.9 and higher.

Inside “Discover” In the tab, you can find various plug-ins to enhance your Mac and add new functionality to it. Installing a plugin is as easy as clicking and clicking on a plugin name. “To organise”.

Some of my favorite plugins:

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

• Blurred Focus: Blurs all open background windows.

• cleanHUD: Replaces Apple’s default volume/brightness control overlay with a much cleaner and minimal overlay.

• PrivateNC: Customize notification center alerts.

My only complaint about mySIMBL is that it’s a little clunky at times. Some tweaks will require you to restart your Mac. Some tweaks may not work on all versions of macOS as well. Still, mySIMBL is an app worth trying. Feel free to check out other addons and let me know which ones are your favourites.

5. More Ways to Customize Your Mac

• Menu bar apps are great on Mac, but some unnecessary apps can make your menu bar look cluttered. You can do rearrange/remove menu bar apps dragging them while holding CMD button on your keyboard. Note that this only works with Apple’s system apps and some third-party apps. If you are looking for a more robust solution, you should get a copy. bartender 2.

• You can change app icons globally on your Mac without using any third-party apps. See our previous post on how to change icons on your Mac.

SEE ALSO: 5 Apps to Stay Healthy While Working on Your Mac

Customize Mac Using These Ways

To me, these were some of the best ways to customize your Mac interface. You can use combinations of tweaks to significantly improve the Mac interface. I tried the following options and apps on my MacBook Air running macOS Sierra and they worked fine for me. So, try these methods and let us know how they worked for you. So, have you customized your Mac? Let me know in the comments below if you find any other customization apps worth mentioning.