OS X Mavericks: General preferences

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General preferences

Use General preferences to change the overall look of OS X to make your working environment more comfortable or to give your desktop a unique look.

Option Description

Appearance

Highlight color

Choose colors from the pop-up menus to make general system color changes.

Sidebar icon size

Choose small, medium, or large icons for the Finder window sidebar and the Mail sidebar. To see the effect of the choices, open a Finder or Mail window as you select them.

Show scroll bars

Scroll bars appear in a window when there’s more information than fits into the window’s current size. If you want the scroll bars to be hidden until you start scrolling, select “When scrolling.”

To test the effect of choosing “Automatically based on input device,” select it, then open a Finder window and reduce its size to make scroll bars appear. Leave the window open as you select and deselect the option.

Click in the scroll bar to

Specify what should happen when you click in the scroll bar. “Jump to the next page” means clicking in the scroll bar moves the content page by page. “Jump to the spot that’s clicked” moves to the spot where you’re clicking; for example, if you click at the bottom of the scroll bar, you go to the bottom of the document.

To momentarily switch between scrolling methods, hold down the Option key while clicking the scroll bar.

Ask to keep changes when closing documents

Unsaved changes are saved automatically when you close documents. If you prefer to be asked if you want to save changes, select this checkbox.

Close windows when quitting an application

If you quit apps with windows still open on your screen, selecting this checkbox prevents the windows from reopening automatically the next time you start their app.

Recent items

The Apple menu has a Recent Items option. Use the pop-up menu to choose how many items should appear in that menu.

This setting also determines how many recent items appear in app menus, such as the File > Open Recent menu in TextEdit.

Use LCD font smoothing when available

Font smoothing reduces jagged edges for some fonts.

If you plan to use small font sizes in your documents, choose a font size from the “Turn off text smoothing for font sizes” pop-up menu.

When text smoothing (or “antialiasing”) is on, smaller fonts can be harder to read.

To make items on the screen appear larger, use the Zoom pane of Accessibility preferences.

Last Modified: Oct 20, 2015
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