Lagos runs at a particular pace. Not slow — that is a cliché that does not survive contact with the morning market, the Friday fish delivery, or the queue at the Camera Municipal on a busy Monday. But considered. Deliberate. The kind of pace that makes you notice when something is taking longer than it should.
Your Mac has a considerable number of features that save time and that most people discover, if they discover them at all, by accident. Here are the ones worth knowing deliberately — ranked by how much time they will actually save you, by someone who has been using Macs since before most of them were invented.
The Ones That Change Everything
⌘ + Space: Spotlight. Search for anything — files, emails, applications, calculator, unit conversions, definitions. Type "35 celsius in fahrenheit" and get the answer immediately. Type the name of any application and open it instantly. This is the single most useful keyboard shortcut on a Mac and the one that most Windows switchers miss entirely because there is no direct equivalent.
⌘ + Tab: Application Switcher. Hold ⌘ and press Tab repeatedly to cycle through open applications. Hold ⌘ + Shift + Tab to go backwards. Faster than clicking on icons in the Dock.
⌘ + ` (backtick): Window Switcher. Switches between open windows of the same application. Essential when you have several Safari windows, or several Word documents, open simultaneously.
⌘ + Shift + 4: Screenshot of a selection. Click and drag to capture any area of the screen. The screenshot saves to your desktop. Add Space after ⌘ + Shift + 4 to click on a specific window. Add Control to copy to clipboard instead of saving.
The Ones for Working Efficiently
⌘ + F: Find. Works in Safari, Word, Pages, most applications. Find any word or phrase in the current document or page instantly.
⌘ + Shift + N: New folder. In Finder, creates a new folder immediately. Useful when you are trying to organise things at speed.
⌘ + Delete: Move to Trash. Moves selected files to the Trash from Finder without dragging. Combine with ⌘ + Shift + Delete to empty the Trash.
Option + click on volume/brightness: Opens Sound/Display preferences directly. Saves navigating through System Settings when you just want to change one thing quickly.
The Hidden Ones That Feel Like Magic
Three-finger drag. In System Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control → Trackpad Options: enable dragging with three fingers. Then drag any window by touching it with three fingers and moving. No clicking and holding required. Once you use this, you will not understand how you managed without it.
Hot Corners. System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Hot Corners. Assign actions to each corner of the screen — Mission Control, Lock Screen, Desktop, or Start Screensaver. Move the cursor to a corner and the action fires instantly. Lock Screen in the top-right corner means locking your Mac takes a fraction of a second.
Quick Look: press Space in Finder. With a file selected, press Space to preview it — photos, PDFs, documents, videos — without opening the application. Press Space again to close. Saves significant time when looking through a folder of files.
The Ones for Life in Portugal Specifically
Option + e, then a vowel: accent marks. Option + e gives you a dead key for the acute accent. Then press a to get á, e for é, o for ó, and so on. Option + ` gives the grave accent (à). Option + n gives the tilde (ã, õ). Essential for writing in Portuguese without wrestling with the character menu.
⌘ + Shift + 5: Screen recording. Records your screen or a portion of it. Useful for showing someone remotely what is happening on your Mac — I often ask clients to send me a short recording of the problem before I visit, which saves time for everyone.
Want your Mac set up to work the way you work?
Beyond shortcuts, there is a considerable amount of configuration that makes a Mac feel genuinely tailored to how you use it — Dock preferences, keyboard customisation, hot corners, trackpad settings, notification management. I set this up for clients in Lagos in about thirty minutes. The difference is noticeable. Same day, in your language.
Get in touch →Lagos rewards the considered approach. So does your Mac. The shortcuts are there. They have always been there. Someone just needed to tell you about them.