Alright, so today I wanted to share a bit about my recent tinkering with what I’ve started calling “mac guscette.” Not a technical term you’ll find in any manual, mind you, more like a nickname I gave to these little tweaks I’ve been implementing on my Mac.
So, what kicked this off?
Well, I’ve been feeling like my workflow was getting a bit clunky. You know how it is, you do the same repetitive little things a hundred times a day. Click here, drag that, open this, type that. I just thought, there has to be a slightly smoother way to handle some of these tiny, annoying steps. I wasn’t looking for a massive overhaul, just some small improvements, some little “guscette” – like those little expanding folds in bags that give you just a bit more room. That’s what I was after for my Mac.
My first thought was, “Okay, where do I even begin?” I remembered some folks talking about custom scripts and little automation tricks, but it always sounded a bit over my head, to be honest. I’m comfortable with my Mac, but I’m no coding wizard.
The Nitty-Gritty Process
So, I started poking around. First, I looked into Automator. It’s built-in, right? Seemed like a good starting point. I tried to create a few simple workflows. Some worked okay, but others were just… finicky. They’d work one day and not the next. Super frustrating.
Then I thought about AppleScript. I’d dabbled with it years ago, like, a decade ago, and mostly just copied and pasted stuff I found online. So, I dug up some old bookmarks and started reading. It was like learning a weird new dialect of English. Lots of trial and error here. I mean, seriously, I must have spent a whole afternoon just trying to get a script to reliably move a specific type of file from my downloads folder to another spot.
I even ventured into the Terminal a bit more than usual. Usually, I just use it for a few basic commands, but I found some neat little one-liners that could act as my “guscette.” Things like quickly showing hidden files or batch renaming stuff. Small things, but they add up.
My process basically involved:
- Identifying a tiny, repetitive task that bugged me.
- Googling around (a lot!) for “macOS automate [the task]”.
- Trying out solutions, usually starting with Automator, then AppleScript, then maybe a shell command if the others failed or were too clunky.
- Testing. And testing again. And again. Because you know, it works perfectly five times, and then on the sixth, it just decides not to.
One specific “guscetta” I’m quite pleased with is a little script that cleans up my desktop. I tend to save everything there temporarily, and it becomes a mess. So, I cobbled together something that, with one click, sorts files into dated folders. It’s not revolutionary, but man, it makes me feel so much better.
There were definitely moments I wanted to just give up. Like when a script I thought was perfect started throwing weird errors I couldn’t decipher. Or when I accidentally made a script that started moving all my files into one folder – that was a bit of a panic moment, let me tell you! Luckily, Time Machine saved the day there. Always have backups, folks, always.
Where I Landed with these “Guscette”
So, after a few weeks of this on-and-off tinkering, my Mac feels a bit more… mine. It’s not like it’s a completely different machine. But these little “guscette,” these small custom touches, have smoothed out some of the daily friction points. It’s the little things, you know?
I don’t have one single app or tool for it. It’s a mix of a few Automator workflows I finally got stable, a couple of AppleScripts I keep handy in the Script Menu, and some shell aliases I now use regularly. Each one is a tiny solution to a tiny problem.
It’s an ongoing process, really. I’ll probably keep adding more of these little helpers as I identify more annoyances. But for now, I’m pretty happy with my collection of “mac guscette.” It wasn’t always easy, and sometimes it felt like I was wrestling with the machine, but getting those little automations to work just right? Pretty satisfying.
So yeah, that’s my little adventure into making my Mac just a tiny bit better, one “guscetta” at a time. Maybe it inspires you to find your own!
