Mac-simizing your Skype experience
Are you getting the most out of Skype on your Mac? We are now updating Skype for Mac every month with new features and quality improvements. While we keep adding new features and making your experience better, we also get questions around how to make Skype more custom to how you want to use it. Today we wanted to show you some of the options for customizing the way Skype looks and feels.
The contact monitor – all your contacts in one small window
To save on screen space you might also like to see you contacts in a compact list. To do this you can bring up the contact monitor with CMD+3.The contact monitor window can be freely resized.
Put your conversations in separate windows
To minimize the amount of space Skype takes up on your screen you can move your conversations to their own windows. Just like the contact monitor, you can resize the conversation windows to keep them small and tidy.
To turn on this option go to the menu bar, go to Skype > Preferences… > General > Tick ‘Open conversations in new window…’.
If you find the font size of your instant messages isn’t quite right for your conversation windows, you can easily increase and decrease it with CMD and the plus and minus keys.
I just can’t get enough keyboard shortcuts!
Well you’re in luck! Here’s a load of hotkeys for you to use in Skype for Mac.
| Action | Hotkey |
| Volume up | CMD+Shift+Up (arrow) |
| Volume down | CMD+Shift+Down (arrow) |
| Mute | CMD+Shift+M |
| Push-to-talk (while muted) | CTRL+OPTION+CMD+Up (arrow) |
| Edit last sent message | CMD+OPTION+E |
| Switch from IM to SMS | CMD+Shift+S |
| Close a chat | CMD+W |
| Mark as unread | CMD+Shift+U |
| Open the dial pad | CMD+2 |
| Open the contact manager | CMD+3 |
We recommend that you upgrade to the latest version to enjoy the best of what Skype has to offer.
That’s all fine, but… the UX is still lame since this switch to new UI. Thanks God there’s still good ol’ Skype 2.8 available for Mac!
“Share screen selection” is one of the important tools to work remotely on a joint paper. This feature vanished in later version, so I am sticking to 2.8.
My skype doesn’t work anymore in my Mac, since last update
I would love to be able to do what you describe above: having a compact contacts window and separate chat windows, but when I double click on a user in the Contacts Monitor the conversation opens in the main Skype window and not a separate chat window. The only way it seems to use the separate chat windows is to double click on the user in the MAIN Skype window. In other words the above features don’t work in conjunction with each other. Is this a bug?
Can there please be a way to change the UI? I have a light hypersensitivity and the white window is very harsh and painful to my eyes… if there could be a black background option for mac that would be really really great.