macOS Customziations

Disable Dictionary.app

Disable the Dictionary.app so it doesn’t always pop-up when you accidentally highlight something, or sneeze.

Make these changes in the System Preferences but note that you may need to adjust settings on some apps too.

• Open System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts
• Click Services
• In Searching section, look for “Look Up in Dictionary” option
• Remove the checkmark
• Click the Show All icon (grid of dots) to get back to System Preferences
• Open Trackpad
• Remove the checkmark for “Look up & data detectors”
• Remove the checkmark for “Force Click and haptic feedback”

TextEdit: Open with a blank file by default

TextEdit should launch and present a blank file by default – and not a file picker.

Open iTerm or Terminal apps and run this:

defaults write com.apple.TextEdit NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false

To do this for all apps, try:

defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false

Restart TextEdit.

To restore, try:

defaults delete -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile