macOS Catalina: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. Messages

Somewhere between email and the telephone lies the joyous communication tool called instant messaging. Plenty of IM programs run on the Mac, but macOS comes with its very own instant messenger program called Messages. (It used to be called iChat.) It’s built right into the system and ready to connect to your friends on Apple’s iCloud network.

Note

At one time, the Messages app could handle chats on a bunch of different chat networks: AIM, Yahoo, Facebook, Jabber, Gtalk, and so on. In macOS Catalina, though, Messages is primarily a gateway to Apple’s own chat network, called iMessages. It requires that both you and your chat partner have iCloud accounts (Chapter 17). (The one exception: It can also show you regular text messages from your iPhone.)

This chapter covers how to use Messages to communicate by video, audio, and text with your online pals.

Welcome to Messages

Messages does seven things very well:

• Instant messaging. Instant messaging combines the privacy of email and the immediacy of the phone. You type messages in a chat window, and your friends type back to you in real time.

  You can keep your text messages, too. They’re not locked onto your phone, like regular text messages, and they don’t scroll away forever, like regular text messages. You can archive them, search them, copy and paste them, print them, forward them, and so on.

• Unified chat/text messages with phones (iMessages). This is huge. If you and your conversation partner both have iCloud ...