You can customize your Mac much further than most people realize, without installing anything. macOS 27 Golden Gate, the current version (27.2 as of October 2026), ships built-in settings for tinted icons, folder colors with emoji, a Liquid Glass slider, a rearrangeable Control Center, and a menu bar you can strip down to almost nothing. Below is every setting worth changing, where it lives, and the few to skip.
Most of it also works on Tahoe 26. The table marks what is new in 27.
The settings at a glance
| Setting | Where | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Liquid Glass slider | System Settings > Appearance | macOS 27 |
| Icon & widget style | System Settings > Appearance | macOS 26 |
| One color for every folder | System Settings > Appearance | macOS 26 |
| Color, symbol, or emoji on one folder | Finder > Customize Folder | macOS 26 |
| Menu bar background and items | System Settings > Menu Bar | macOS 26 |
| Control Center layout | Control Center > Edit Controls | macOS 26 |
| Custom icon for a file or app | File > Get Info | Long-standing |
| Pointer size and colors | Accessibility > Display > Pointer | Long-standing |
Start with Appearance, because it changes everything at once
Open System Settings > Appearance first. Light, Dark, or Auto sits at the top, and Auto follows your Night Shift schedule.
The Liquid Glass slider is new in Golden Gate. It replaces the Clear or Tinted switch from Tahoe 26.1 and runs from clearest on the left to most tinted on the right, with three notches and a default in the middle. The Dock shows the difference most, but widgets, sidebars, and toolbars follow. If Tahoe ever felt hard to read, drag it two-thirds of the way right before you go digging through Accessibility.
Below that sits Icon & widget style, which does more to change the look of your Mac than anything else in the pane:
- Default: opaque icons on light or colored backgrounds.
- Dark: darkened icons, set to Always or Auto.
- Clear: transparent icons, in Light, Dark, or Auto.
- Tinted: opaque icons on a dark background, all in one hue you pick under Icon, widget, & folder color.
Pick Tinted with a muted color. Dock icons, widgets, and Finder folders all shift to one palette, and the Mac finally looks like something you set up on purpose. Clear looks striking in screenshots (that's where it belongs), but a full Dock of glass icons is slower to scan every single time you reach for an app.
Color sets the accent for buttons and menus, and Text highlight color sets how selected text looks. Match the accent to your icon tint so blue buttons don't fight a green Dock.
Change folder colors, one folder or all of them
There are two levels here, and most people only find one.
To recolor every folder at once, use Folder color in System Settings > Appearance. It appears when your icon style is Default, Dark, or Clear. With Tinted, it merges into the single Icon, widget, & folder color control.
To change one folder, Control-click it in Finder and choose Customize Folder. Pick a color circle, a symbol, or an emoji, then click outside the panel to save. Symbols come out as subtle monochrome marks; emoji stay in full color. Put emoji on the handful of folders you open daily and leave the rest plain. When every folder has an emoji, none of them tell you anything.
To undo, click Clear in the same panel. Your Home folder can be customized, but Applications, Library, System, and Users can't.
Swap any icon with Get Info
This trick predates Tahoe by decades. Copy an image in Preview with Edit > Copy, select a file, folder, or app in Finder, and press Command-I. Click the small icon at the top of the Info window, then choose Edit > Paste.
One tip: if Paste is grayed out, you clicked the large preview icon instead.
To go back, select that small icon again and choose Edit > Cut.
It works on apps you installed yourself, sometimes after a password prompt or, on Tahoe and later, a restart. Apple's built-in apps generally refuse, and the workarounds mean switching off system security protections. Not worth it for an icon.
Clean up the menu bar
System Settings > Menu Bar became its own pane in Tahoe. Show menu bar background decides if your wallpaper runs to the top edge of the screen. Turn it off. Automatically hide and show the menu bar offers Always, On Desktop Only, In Full Screen Only, or Never, and In Full Screen Only is the useful one.
Menu Bar Controls lists Apple's items (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery, Sound, Focus, Weather, and more), and Allow in the Menu Bar does the same for third-party apps. Turn off anything you haven't clicked in a month.
To rearrange what's left, hold Command and drag an icon sideways. Command-drag one off the bar to remove it. On notched MacBooks, Golden Gate folds icons that don't fit behind an overflow arrow, and you don't get to choose which ones go. That makes order matter more than it used to, so keep the icons you need on the right.
Rebuild Control Center
Click Control Center in the menu bar, then Edit Controls. Drag controls in, out, or around, and Control-click any control to change its size or choose Add to Menu Bar. Put daily controls in the menu bar and weekly ones in Control Center. Delete the rest. If you've never mirrored your screen, Screen Mirroring doesn't need a tile.
Dock and desktop
Under System Settings > Desktop & Dock you get Size, Magnification, Dock position on screen, Automatically hide and show the Dock, and Show suggested and recent apps in Dock. I keep my Dock on the left, hidden, with recent apps off. A hidden Dock gives back space on a laptop, and the recent apps section mostly fills up with apps you quit on purpose.
For widgets, Control-click the wallpaper, choose Edit Widgets, and drag in what you want. Control-click a widget to resize it. Dim widgets on desktop and Use iPhone widgets live back in Desktop & Dock. Two or three widgets look intentional. Eight look like a dashboard you'll stop reading.
Stage Manager is in the same pane. Skip it unless you already know you like it.
Wallpaper and screen saver
System Settings > Wallpaper has Dynamic Wallpapers that shift with the time of day, the Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater, and Earth aerials, Shuffle Aerials, solid Colors, and Your Photos. The aerials are the best thing here. Pick one and it can also run as your screen saver, playing in slow motion.
For a different screen saver, click Screen Saver inside Wallpaper settings; when it starts is set in System Settings > Lock Screen. The lock screen deserves its own post, and it has one: Customize Your Mac Lock Screen.
Change the pointer
System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Pointer has a Pointer size slider, Pointer outline color, Pointer fill color, and Reset Colors. One notch larger helps on a big display. Set the outline to your accent color while you're there.
When built-in settings run out
Everything above is free and takes about twenty minutes. For what macOS doesn't offer at all, like video wallpapers, you need third-party apps, and the ones worth installing are in 7 Mac apps that change how your screen looks.
The one moment macOS doesn't let you design
After all of this, there's still a gap. You can style the lock screen, but the second you open the lid or sign back in, macOS drops you straight onto the desktop.
Nothing marks it.
That's why I built Stir, a free menu bar app for exactly that second. When your Mac wakes, it shows a short animated greeting over the desktop and fades out after a few seconds.
It has 22 themes, 6 free and 16 more in a one-time Pro purchase. You can keep the greeting on screen anywhere from 1 to 8 seconds, set Quiet Hours so it stays away at certain times, and pause it from the menu bar. It needs macOS 15 or later, so Golden Gate and Tahoe are both covered.
Common Questions
Does Clear icon mode hurt readability? For some people, yes. Clear icons pick up whatever is behind them, so busy wallpapers make them harder to tell apart. Try a calmer wallpaper or move the Liquid Glass slider toward the tinted end. If that still bothers you, Tinted keeps the uniform look with solid icons.
How do I undo all of this?
Set Icon & widget style back to Default and return the slider to the middle notch. Use Clear in Customize Folder for folders and Edit > Cut in Get Info for custom icons.
Will my folder colors show on other devices? Folders in iCloud Drive keep their color, symbol, or emoji on devices running version 26 or later. Older systems show a standard folder, so on a Mac still running Sequoia your careful emoji system simply isn't there.