When I bought my first Mac sev­eral years ago, it took a while to fig­ure out how to do all the stuff I already knew how to do on my PC. While I am a techie, geek and Mac Addict and spent the time fig­ur­ing this stuff out, there’s no need for you to have to search around to fig­ure these things out on our spank­ing new Mac. To help you with the tran­si­tion for all those new Mac own­ers out there, I’ve put together a quick guide for Mac new­bies mak­ing the big switch.

The fol­low­ing is a list of things that stick out from when I made the move to my first Mac. So if you’re delv­ing into Macs for the first time, the fol­low­ing should come in handy.

Key­board Short­cuts

Luck­ily, when it comes to the actual key­board short­cuts, a lot of the short­cuts on your Mac are the same as they are on your Win­dows PC; gen­er­ally you can just swap Com­mand for Con­trol for a lot of the stan­dards. For exam­ple, the Ctrl-C/X/V for Copy/Cut/Paste become Cmd-C/X/V. Sim­ple, right?

Instead of bor­ing you with a long list of key­board short­cuts like those, I’m just going to high­light some of the less obvi­ous shortcuts.

• Force Quit: When a pro­gram freezes up on your Win­dows PC and you want to force it
  closed, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. On your Mac, you’ll hit Cmd-Alt-Escape. This brings up the Force Quit dia­log — a sim­i­lar tool
  to the task man­ager for the pur­pose of clos­ing unre­spon­sive apps.

• Minimize/Hide: You can min­i­mize a win­dow to the dock from your key­board by press­ing Cmd-M. Or you can Hide an appli­ca­tion by press­ing Cmd-H. The dif­fer­ence is that hid­ing an appli­ca­tion does not put any­thing on the dock, but hids every win­dow of that app. Instead all appli­ca­tion win­dows dis­ap­pear from view until you switch back. In my opin­ion hid­ing is a bet­ter option because you can Cmd-Tab back to a hid­den appli­ca­tion and it will restore to your screen; how­ever press­ing Cmd-Tab to a min­i­mized app will leave the app on the dock.

• Open­ing selected file: If you’ve ever opened a file or pro­gram on your PC by select­ing the file and then hit­ting Enter to launch it you will need to know this tip. If you try to do the same on your Mac, your Mac will think you want to rename the file instead of open it. To open the file, you have to hit Cmd-O (for open).

• Back­space vs Delete: On Macs, the back­space key is called Delete. This key deletes from right to left, just like the back­space key. If you want to delete test from left to right, like the win­dows delete key, you will have to press Function-Delete (espe­cially if you’re on a lap­top). As well if you want to delete a file or folder from with a key press, select the file and press Cmd-Delete and it will go straight to the Trash.

• Clos­ing win­dows and apps: In the Win­dows envi­ron­ment, when­ever you close the last open win­dow from a pro­gram, that pro­gram quits. Things do not oppo­rate like that in the Mac world. Cmd-W will close the active win­dow, how­ever — unlike in Win­dows — once you’ve closed the last win­dow of an appli­ca­tion, the app will con­tinue to run. If you want to quit a Mac app, you hit Cmd-Q (for quit). This one is espe­cially impor­tant when you first switch to a Mac so you don’t end of wast­ing your sys­tem mem­ory run­ning sev­eral apps you’re not using.

Installing apps

This may seem like some­what of a no brainer for Mac vet­er­ans, but when you switch to a Mac from a PC, you may find the instal­la­tion process of new appli­ca­tions a bit con­fus­ing at first. That’s because, in gen­eral, there’s absolutely noth­ing to it. When you down­load an appli­ca­tion (gen­er­ally in the form of a com­pressed .dmg file, which will mount as a drive when you open it), you’re pretty much done with
the instal­la­tion process. You can run an appli­ca­tion (marked by the .app exten­sion) from any­where on your com­puter, and there’s really no instal­la­tion to it. Broadly speak­ing, the instal­la­tion of a new Mac app gen­er­ally con­sists of mov­ing the new appli­ca­tion to your Appli­ca­tions folder. Many apps make this very sim­ple, like the mounted Fire­fox .dmg above.

Unless you have your own sys­tem for arrang­ing apps on your Mac, copy­ing new apps to the Appli­ca­tions folder is a good prac­tice. What you don’t want to do is for­get to move the app from the .dmg folder to your hard disk.

While this arti­cle is just scratch­ing the sur­face I hope it helps those read­ers who have just switched to a Mac or plan to soon. I’m sure their will be more writ­ten on this topic hear in the future, so if you’ve got ques­tions on the sub­ject; say there is some­thing you did on your Win­dows that you just can’t seem to fig­ure out how to do on your Mac — then let’s hear it. Send us your ques­tions and we will do our best to get answers up. Also if you’re a Mac Addict like us hear at About this Mac and you have your own tips, we’d love to hear those as well.