How To Customize a Minimalist Mac

With minimalism getting a lot of attention today, how would you customize your Mac to make it minimalist? You can stop using the Desktop as a storage location and use a simple background. You can virtually get rid of the Dock and menu bar. You can practice minimalism when storing, archiving and backing up your files too. Safari and Spotlight also have options that should appeal to minimalists. Choosing the perfect minimalist Mac is tough, as they all are appealing.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's create a minimalist Mac.
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So minimalism is a big thing nowadays. I practice minimalism in some parts of my life but I wouldn't call myself a minimalist. Still I'm fascinated by the idea of a minimalist Mac. What changes would I make to my desktop, the apps I use and how I use them to make something that's truly minimalist. I can tell you in researching this I did discover a few things that might actually be useful even though I'm not going to practice Mac minimalism normally.
So I've created a brand new user account to use for this experiment. The first thing I want to do is I want to cleanup the desktop. Now I don't have any files on here and I want to keep it that way. So the rule for minimalism is nothing on the desktop. I've got my external hard drives here so I want to turn those off. I go to Finder, Preferences, and turn off external disks, CD's and DVD's. Now how about in the background. So I could use the default background. It's kind of minimalist, right, just using the default. But I think a better option maybe to change the desktop background. So I Control click on it, just to get a shortcut to go to System Preferences. I'm going to go to Colors for the desktop background and I'm going to switch to black. This is actually what I use as my normal desktop background in my normal working user account.
So next let's deal with the Dock. We don't want to have all these applications here in the Dock. We could just use Spotlight to launch applications so we don't need the Dock. So let's remove everything from the Dock that we can. Okay, so I've still got the one app that I'm running which is the screen recording software, the Finder and the Trash. Now recent apps are going to also appear here. So I want to make sure I turn that Off. So I'll go to System Preferences, Dock, and I'll turn off Show Recent Applications in the Dock. So that will get rid of that. I can also make some other changes here. I can turn it so that the size is smaller, some sort of minimalist size like that, where it's just big enough that I can use it kind of as an app switcher and still throw things away in the Trash if I want to. I can also turn off Automatically Hide and Show the Dock which means the Dock actually goes away unless I actually go to the bottom of the screen.
Next let's deal with the Menu Bar. I can get rid of a lot of this stuff over here. If I go into System Preferences there are check boxes for most of these. For Instance if I go to Network I can turn off the Status Bar there for that and I can do the same thing if I go to Displays. I can turn off that. I can do the same thing for Siri. I can get rid of the time and date. So that really minimizes everything there. In addition to that I can go to General and then turn on Automatically Hide and Show the Menu Bar.
Now look what I've got. It's a totally blank screen. The Menu Bar appears when I move my cursor up there. The Dock appears, but pretty small and minimal, when I move my cursor down there.
So how about File organization. I had to put some thought into that. I probably want to have all my files and documents and only have files that I really need. Maybe I would have an archive drive or a Cloud service like Dropbox or something where I could archive files to once I'm done with them. The organizational structure inside of Documents would probably be folders inside of folders inside of folders. So maybe just work and home. Then for work each work project and under each work project subfolders for that and keep it in such a way that I'm never looking at a huge list of files unless I have to. I probably want to use iCloud, have it all stored on iCloud for efficiency, and then also think of using iCloud maybe as my backup. But I don't know if I could really go without a regular backup. So maybe a Time Machine drive attached to my network and I can tuck the network hardware and that Time Machine drive away somewhere where I don't have to see them.
There are a few other places where you may want to minimalize things. One of those is Spotlight. You can customize Spotlight in System Preferences and turn a lot of these things off and just have the ones you need. So if you going to primarily use it as an App launcher and maybe to find documents you want to turn most of these off. Now Spotlight will launch a lot cleaner and not bring up so much clutter.
Safari is another great place to minimalize things. Actually default Safari has things pretty minimal. If you go to View you can see most of the stuff, the sidebars and tab bars and bookmarks bar and all of that, are all turned off. I would probably only use Bookmarks for sites that you visit on a regular basis. Under Favorites here you can see that first nine have keyboard shortcuts so maybe limiting it to the top nine sites that you visit on a regular basis and you won't have to type in the URL. If you do need to save things just to go back to say an article and read it later then you probably want to use the Reading List to do that.
Also Reader View is a great tool for minimalism. So if you go to a website and you view an article on that site then you can click the little Reader View up here. You can see it's much nicer to read. If I Control click here and go to Settings for this website I can enable Use Reader When Available. So you can do that for news websites. Now when I go to another article you can see it jumps right away to Reader View and it will do that from now on at this site.
So how about apps. One way to think of it as a minimalist would be to only stick with Apple stock apps plus the extra Apple apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMovie, and GarageBand. Maybe only the ones you need. So if you never do video or never do music then you don't need iMovie or GarageBand. If you never do spreadsheets you don't need Numbers. So you don't have to have them on your Mac. But if you're work requires you to have other apps, like maybe you're a graphic designer and you use PhotoShop and Illustrator all the time, then definitely have those apps. But nothing extra. Pick one app for one purpose. So one graphics app or one sound editing app.
So which app is actually the best for minimalist's. They all are pretty minimalist. I mean look at the iMac. There's just one cord coming out of it, the power cord. Then you have a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse or trackpad. A Mac Mini. Well you can't spell minimalist without mini. But there you're going to have a power cord coming out of it. You're going to have a display with a power cord out of that. You're going to have to have a keyboard, trackpad or mouse. So I think the clear winner is to go with MacBooks because really it's just one unit. The trackpad and the keyboard are built into it. The screen is built into it. You don't even have to have any cables running out of it for you using it on battery power. Plus, of course, it is small and tiny. You could tuck it away when you're not using it. You could slip it into a drawer and get it completely out of site. You can take the entire thing with you. So you can go to an office and have nothing in your office except a desk and a chair and stick the MacBook on it and start working.
Which MacBook. Well, MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. That adds extra complications. So let's simplify things and say either the MacBook Air and the MacBook. The MacBook might be under powered for a lot of people although it is the smallest. So one of those two. The MacBook Air might be the perfect medium between having power and having minimalism in the design.
So what do you think? What's the perfect minimalist Mac? What's the perfect minimalist setup for your Mac? Of the things I've shown you here what do you agree with and what do you disagree with. What other things would you do to be a Mac minimalist? Leave your suggestion in the Comments below.
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