Launchpad: It's More Useful Than You've Been Told

hi this is Gary with Mac bos.com let's take a look at using Launchpad on your [Music] Mac Macos is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to mmos.com patreon there you could read more about it join us and get exclusive content and course discounts now Launchpad is one of the many ways that you can launch applications on your Mac but a lot of people don't seem to like Launchpad I really badmouth it online I don't get this as nobody's forcing anybody to use it and it actually has advantages over some of the other methods for launching apps so one way to get to Launchpad is to go to the dog and look for the Launchpad icon usually all the way to the left if you click it there you're in Launchpad but there are other ways to bring up Launchpad as well one is to use a keyboard shortcut now some mac keyboards particularly older ones have a Launchpad key on the keyboard already on mine it's the F4 key so if I press F4 it brings up Launchpad but depending upon your keyboard settings you're going to need to hold down the FN or Globe key and press F4 to do that but you can also assign another key of your choosing so let's go to system settings and then go to keyboard and then choose keyboard shortcuts now you're going to see under Launchpad at Doc show Launchpad now even if it's checked here if there's no keyboard shortcut set then you don't have a keyboard shortcut for it just double click here where it says None and then use the keyboard shortcut one good option is to use option and then space bar so while command space is Spotlight option space is Launchpad so now when you use option space it brings it up but there are other ways to bring up Launchpad one is hot Corners if you go into system settings and then go to desktop and dock here and then scroll all the way down to the bottom you'll see a button for hot Corners go into that and you can set one of the corners up to go to Launchpad so I'm going to use the top right corner so now if I just move my pointer to the top right hand corner I'm in Launchpad I could also hold down one of the modifier Keys like command or option or shift or a combination of those and then I would need to actually hold command down while I'm in that top right corner for Launchpad to launch this is Handy if you find yourself accidentally triggering it a lot another way to do it is using the trackpad so if you go to your trackpad settings and to more gestures you're to find a gesture for Launchpad here it's pinch with thumb and three fingers so in this case I've got it turned on and you can see a demonstration of it there at the top now one of the main complaints about using Launchpad is that when you bring it up you have to search for the app you want to launch and it could be on a different page obviously there not going to be enough slots here for all of your apps so only some of them are on this first page you can see the Dots here at the bottom indicating how many pages you have you can actually click on one of the dots to jump to it or you can use two fingers on a trackpad or a mouse and scroll like that you can also use command and the right and left arrow keys to go between the pages so you've got to go through all these Pages find the app that you want to launch and then click it to launch it so I think the best way to use Launchpad by far is to use the search box at the top and in fact you don't even need to click there to use it soon as you bring up Launchpad typing any letter keys on the keyboard are going to go right into that search box so for instance if I want to launch the calculator app I can just start typing and as I do you can see it Narrows things down I've got only apps that make sense with the letter c if I continue to type there's CA c c c and there I am at calculator and then I press return and it launches the calculator app this is similar to using Spotlight where I can do command space and then type calc and then I can see the calculator app come up and in this case it's the first hit it's right there so it takes the same amount of keystrokes to do it Launchpad as it does to do it in Spotlight that's not always the case for all apps sometimes the top hit won't be the app itself and you have to use the arrow keys to go down other times it takes a while for spotlight to actually give you results because there's so much for spotlight to look up documents web pages emails fonts everything like that now you can also use the arrow keys to get to things you don't need to use the track pattern Mouse at all so I'm going to bring up Spotlight here and then as soon as I hit the right arrow key you can see I've now got the very first app selected there at the top and I can use the arrow keys to travel around and when I want to launch an app all I need to do is use the return key so I can go here to reminder say return and it launches that app and then combine that with command and right and left and I get to any page I want and then any app I want now of course you can arrange the apps in any order you want here each page is a list so it starts at the top left it goes across and then down with each row so it's not something where you can place an app exactly where you want it it's just in a long list here very similar to how the iPhone and iPad work so if I want to move Safari to the first slot I just drag it over to the left and it moves it there if I want to move something to the next page of apps like this one I could just move it all the way to the right and I'll go to the next page and I could drop it there like wise I can take this one and move it to the left and place it where I want on this page you can also create folders the way you do that is to take one app and drop it onto another like that and now you've created a folder you can click here and name it and then click away from it and now you got a media folder and you can drag other apps into that media folder click on it and now you've got this page inside of a page and if you ever want to get one out you just drag it out it puts you there on the main page page you can drag these folders to other Pages as well so if you really want you can take the time to arrange things on the different pages and in folders in addition searching will work even if it's in a folder so for instance here in this other folder I've got text edit so if I searched for text edit you could see it finds it just as easily as if it's at the main level folders are also Ed for heidy apps that you don't want to see if you really want to just have the main apps that you see here maybe hide some other things maybe things you don't use all the time or little utility apps that are put there by other things like for instance ad doe likes to put a lot of different icons in here you can create a folder and just hide everything that you don't want to see in that folder take it as the last item on the last page if you want a few things to note about the apps that you'll find in Launchpad one is that you'll find both apps that are in the top level applications folder that's for all users but also apps that are in your home folder applications folder so something you've installed just for that one user account another thing to know is that if you launch an app from Launchpad or using any other method and the app is already running it simply switches to that app in fact some people will simply use the same technique whether it's Launchpad or Spotlight or whatever to both launch an app and switch to that app now of course another thing you use Launchpad for is to remove apps so uninstall them if you click and hold on any app and wait holding it down that everything starts to wiggle and some of the apps have this little X next to them you can also just hold the option key down and it will do that so as long as the option Keys held down you get those now the reason some of them don't have the little X is because they're part of the operating system so you can't delete them another reason is because you've installed them outside of the App Store so only App Store install apps will have this x here and app store installed apps should for the most part put all of their components inside the app so simply removing it from the applic ation folder which is what clicking on the X here does will in fact delete the app and you don't have to worry about anything else apps that are from outside the App Store may do different things and you need to refer to the Publishers documentation for how to uninstall them it's probably just dragging into the trash from the applications folder but some of them may have other libraries that you want to delete although that's getting rarer today as more developers are creating their apps properly where everything's inside the app now another thing you should know about Launchpad is that the dock icon has special properties you see the doc icon here and you can just click it to of course launch Launchpad but if you click and hold or control click it brings up a menu and the menu is an alphabetical list of all of the apps in Launchpad so you can easily get to them notice how also has folders there's the one we created right there so the more folders you create the easier this will be to navigate the alphabetic order makes it very easy to use a Launchpad here from the doc rather than the full screen version or you can use the keyboard for instance if I press F you can see how it jumps right to the fs if I do a couple of characters like fi it jumps right to the first one it starts with Fi and then you could just use the return key to launch the app if you ever want to reset Launchpad get it back to its initial State you can do so using a special terminal command so I'm going to use Launchpad to launch the terminal and then I'm going to use this command default write com. apple. do then reset Launchpad and capitalization matters so make sure you get it exactly like that Dash b o l for Boolean space true now when I do that nothing will happen right away I need to restart Launchpad launch pad's part of the doc so I do kill all Doc now look what happens when I go to Launchpad I'm back to the default here notice there are only three pages and everything here is set up exactly as it would be when you get a new Mac also notice that all the folders are gone so there for instance is the TV app it's no longer in the media folder so everything's been completely reset there's another terminal command you might want to use and this one default wr. apple. springboard D rs- in for integer space five that will change the number of rows to five that's the default but let's say I wanted to have more rows so let's say seven I do that and I'm going to use the same kill all Doc to restart it and now when I bring up Launchpad you could see I now have seven rows and you could do the same thing here with columns let's do nine columns and then kill all Doc and now when I bring up Launchpad you can see it fits like that if you ever want to reset these then just reset the number of columns to seven reset the number of rows to five and then kill all Dock and now you're back to how it originally was and here's one last tip if you want to arrange icons there's no way unfortunately select multiple icons and move them to another page but you can search for something and move it so for instance if I want to move this app to this page I could do it by being at the page where I want it to land and then starting a search for it as soon as I see it there click and start dragging and now I'm still at that original page so I can just drop it there so that's a look at how to use Launchpad and as I said before it's just one of many ways to launch apps so if you prefer another way you don't have to use Launchpad it's one of those things where you can actually use your Mac completely without using Launchpad if you like whereas other Mac users may like to use it all the time instead of other app launching methods hope you found this useful thanks for [Music] watching if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 29,508

Keywords: how to use launchpad, how to make launchpad useful, how to reset launchpad, reset launchpad, launchpad folders

Id: WweV_Zm8Xn8

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023