You're staring at a wall of text on your MacBook, and your brain is already checked out. You just need to mark that one sentence for later. It sounds simple. It should be simple. But then you realize "highlighting" isn't just one thing—it’s a messy mix of cursor drags, PDF annotations, and weird keyboard shortcuts that vary depending on if you're in Safari, Word, or a random Preview document.
Most people think they know how do I highlight on a Mac, but they usually stop at clicking and dragging. That’s the slow way. If you’re trying to actually be productive, you’re missing about 70% of the functionality built into macOS Sequoia and earlier versions.
Honestly, the "right" way to highlight depends entirely on what you’re looking at. Selecting text is one thing; applying a permanent neon yellow digital stroke is another. We’re going to break down the nuance of both because, let’s be real, Apple doesn't make the distinction very clear in their onboarding tutorials.
The Basic Selection: More Than Just a Click
The most instinctive answer to "how do I highlight on a Mac" is the standard text selection. You click. You drag. You release.
But there are levels to this.
If you want to be precise, stop dragging your mouse like it’s 1998. Double-clicking a word selects that specific word. Triple-clicking? That grabs the entire paragraph. It’s a massive time-saver when you’re trying to copy-paste chunks of data from a website into a spreadsheet. If you’re working with a massive document and need to highlight a huge section, click at the start, hold down the Shift key, and click at the end. Your Mac automatically fills in everything in between. It's much cleaner than trying to drag your cursor while the screen scrolls uncontrollably fast.
📖 Related: Tyla E. Hart UF: What You Probably Didn’t Know About Her Research
Then there’s the "Option" key trick. This is the one that makes people look like power users. If you hold Option while dragging your cursor, you can sometimes perform a "block selection" or "rectangular selection" in certain apps like TextEdit or professional code editors. This lets you highlight vertically rather than just following the flow of the sentences. It's niche, but when you need to grab a column of numbers without grabbing the text next to it, it’s a lifesaver.
How Do I Highlight on a Mac Using Preview?
When most people ask about highlighting, they aren't talking about selecting text to copy it. They mean they have a PDF open and they want to mark it up. For this, Preview is your best friend, even though it feels a bit clunky until you find the right buttons.
Open your PDF. Look at the top toolbar. You'll see a small icon that looks like a pen inside a circle—that's the Markup Toolbar. Click it. Now, a whole new row of tools appears. The one you want looks like a highlighter pen.
Once that's active, any text you click and drag over will turn yellow by default.
But yellow is boring.
If you click the little arrow next to the highlighter icon, you can change the color to green, blue, pink, or purple. You can even choose "Strikethrough" or "Underline" if you're in editing mode. A quick tip: if you’re doing a lot of reading, use the keyboard shortcut Command + Control + H. This toggles the highlighter on and off instantly. It prevents that annoying cycle of moving your mouse back up to the toolbar every thirty seconds.
One thing people get wrong is trying to highlight an image-based PDF. If the PDF was created from a scan and hasn't been through OCR (Optical Character Recognition), your Mac won't "see" the text. You’ll try to drag, and nothing will happen. In that case, you have to use the "Shapes" tool in the Markup toolbar to draw a semi-transparent rectangle over the text. It’s a workaround, but it works when the file is stubborn.
The Secret World of Safari Highlights
Apple introduced a feature called Quick Notes a while back, and it changed the game for researching on the web.
When you’re in Safari and you find a quote you love, highlight it. Then, right-click (or Control-click) and select "Add to Quick Note." Not only does this save the text, but it actually creates a persistent highlight on that webpage.
The next time you visit that exact URL, your highlight will still be there.
It’s a bit like digital graffiti, but useful. This is huge for students or researchers who keep losing track of which part of a 5,000-word article they actually needed. You can manage all these snippets in the Notes app, and they’ll link back directly to the source. It’s probably the most underrated "highlight" feature in the entire Apple ecosystem.
Highlighting in Pages and Microsoft Word
If you've moved over to the "work" side of things, the rules change again. In Pages, highlighting isn't actually a "highlighter" tool in the traditional sense; it’s technically called "Character Fill Color."
- Select your text.
- Go to the Format sidebar on the right.
- Click "Style."
- Click the gear icon (advanced options).
- Find "Character Fill Color" and pick your neon shade.
It’s buried. Why is it buried? Who knows. Apple decided that "highlighting" in a word processor is a professional formatting choice rather than a quick annotation.
Microsoft Word on Mac is a bit more intuitive. The highlighter tool is right there on the "Home" tab. It looks like a pen with a yellow bar under it. Pro-tip: you can double-click that icon to "lock" the highlighter. This lets you go through a 20-page document clicking whatever you want without having to re-select the tool every time. Hit Esc when you’re done to return to a normal cursor.
Keyboard Shortcuts for the Impatient
If you really want to master how do I highlight on a Mac, you need to keep your hands off the mouse.
- Command + A: Highlights (selects) every single thing in the window.
- Shift + Arrow Keys: Highlights text character by character.
- Shift + Option + Arrow Keys: Highlights text word by word.
- Shift + Command + Arrow Keys: Highlights an entire line or the whole document from where your cursor is sitting.
I use these constantly when I'm editing. It's much more precise than trying to aim a trackpad cursor between a "t" and an "h" at the end of a sentence.
Accessibility and "Hover Text"
Sometimes you don't want to highlight for the sake of marking it down; you just want to see it better. macOS has a feature called Hover Text. You can find this in System Settings > Accessibility > Zoom.
Once it’s on, you can hold Command and hover your mouse over any text. Your Mac will pop up a high-resolution, large-type version of that text in a dedicated window. It’s a "temporary highlight" that makes reading small UI elements or dense legal fine print much easier on the eyes. It’s not a traditional highlight, but for many people asking the question, it's actually the solution they're looking for.
💡 You might also like: Why Buying a 2 Pack DeWalt Battery Actually Saves You Money (and Sanity)
Why Your Highlights Might Disappear
There is nothing more frustrating than spending an hour highlighting a PDF in Preview, saving it, and then opening it on a Windows PC or sending it to a colleague only to find the highlights are gone.
This happens because of how "layers" work in PDF files. Preview sometimes saves highlights as an annotation layer that isn't "flattened."
To make sure your highlights stick, you can try "printing" the document to PDF. Go to File > Print, then click the PDF dropdown at the bottom and select Save as PDF. This usually bakes the highlights into the actual image of the page, making them visible on any device, even if the receiving app doesn't support Apple's specific annotation metadata.
Actionable Next Steps
To truly get comfortable with highlighting on your Mac, don't just read about it. Try these three things right now:
- Open a website in Safari, highlight a sentence, right-click, and "Add to Quick Note" to see how the persistent highlight looks.
- Open a random PDF in Preview and use Command + Control + H to toggle the highlighter tool without clicking a single menu button.
- Practice the Shift + Option + Right Arrow shortcut to select text one word at a time; it will feel clunky for five minutes and then it will become your new best friend.
Getting the hang of these nuances turns the Mac from a basic tool into an extension of how you think and process information. Stop dragging the mouse and start using the built-in shortcuts that are hiding in plain sight.