General Preferences

In this lesson for macOS Mojave on the Mac, I look at the General Preference pane in more detail. The General Preference pane is where you can set if you want to use Dark Mode (new in macOS Mojave), if you want to show the scrollbars in a window, as well as the default browser you want to use.

Appearance
This option is new in macOS Mojave. With Appearance, you can set if you want to view macOS in Light mode, which is on by default, or Dark mode, which makes all the windows, menu bar, and dock dark.

Accent Color and Highlight Color
This sets the color of what you highlight and select including what the color is when you click in the Menu Bar.

Sidebar Icon Size
This sets the size of the icons in a Finder window sidebar.

Automatically Hide the Menu Bar
When you turn this on, the Menu Bar will automatically hide unless you have the cursor at the top of your display.

Show Scroll Bars and Scroll Bar Behavior when Clicked
This is where you can set if you want to always see the scrollbars in a window as well as what happens when you click on the scroll bar. You can set it to jump page-by-page everytime you click, or jump to the spot that you click on in the scroll bar.

Default Web Browser
This is where you set what browser you want tor Mac to use by default. You must have the browsers installed on your Mac before you can select them as a default browser.

Ask to Keep Changes when Closing Documents
By default, your Mac will save any changes to a document when you close the document. If you select this, the Mac will ask you to save changes before it closes the window.

Close Windows when Quitting an App
This sets if you want the Mac to close any open windows when you quit an app. If you select this, the next time you open the app you closed, your documents will not re-open.

Recent Items
This is where you can set how many recent items show under the Apple Menu.

Allow Handoff
When this is turned on, you can ‘hand off’ documents that your start on your Mac or iOS device to one another.

Use Font Smoothing
This will smooth the font on your display when the feature is available.

See this Lesson Action
To see this lesson in action, take a look at the video above.