Bjørn Stabell 白熊

Learning keyboard shortcuts will significantly improve your speed, letting you focus on your work instead of boring mechanical movements. Perhaps even more importantly, though, is that they can help you avoid repetitive strain injuries (RSI).

As opposed to many other lists of keyboard shortcuts, this post focuses on the shortcuts you’ll use the most and that work for all or most apps, so they are well worth the effort in learning. The consistency of keyboard shortcuts across Mac applications is one of the nice surprises if you’re previously used to Windows or Linux

(I use weird characters in this post that may or may not show up unless you’re on a Mac.)

Here’s a quick overview overview over the symbols used for the most interesting keys on the keyboard:

⌘	Command key (also abbreviated as Cmd)
⌥	Option key (also abbreviated as Opt or Alt)
⇧	Shift key
＾	Control key (also abbreviated as Ctrl)
fn	The function key (lower left of keyboard)
⇥	Tab key
↩	Return key
⇥	Tab key
⌫	Backspace key
▶▼◀▲	Arrow keys

Applications are not windows

Unlike Windows and Linux, OS X differentiates clearly between applications and windows; they are shown differently in the Dock, and you navigate between them in different ways.

Starting and stopping applications

The Dock shows a list of icons representing applications, folder shortcuts, and minimized windows. Any application running will show up in the Dock, but you can also set some frequently used applications to always show up there. It is important to note that differently from Windows and Linux application icons represents applications, and can show up whether the application is running or not; running applications are denoted by having a little light showing up below or to the side of the icon (depending on where your Dock is).

You can click on applications to start them or to switch them to the active application. You can click-and-hold (or right-click or ＾-click) to pop up a menu that shows some extra options, including quitting the application. Also hold down the ⌥ key to get the “force quit” option to kill misbehaving applications (it happens).

It’s easy to end up with tons of running applications without knowing about it in OS X, but they do eat up memory and slow down your machine, so I frequently scan for the little lights and quit applications I’m not currently using.

I usually also create a shortcut to the “Applications” folder in the Dock to make it easy to launch any application from the Dock.

Spotlight is a great way to find anything on your machine. I use it mostly as an application launcher. Press ⌘space to open up spotlight and start typing the application name; once the application you’re looking for is the highlighted search result, hit ↩.

Quitting the application is as easy as hitting ⌘Q. If the application is misbehaving you may have to use the Dock to force it to quit (see above).

Navigating between applications, windows, and tabs

To navigate between already running applications hold down ⌘ while pressing ⇥. You can also use the mouse to click on the application icon you want. You’ll find that the most frequently used application is moved to the left, so if you’re switching between two applications it becomes a matter of just hitting ⌘⇥ to switch.

Once you’re in the right application you can hold down ⌘ and press ` to cycle between the windows of the application. Alternatively you can hit the exposé key (same key as F3) to show all open windows of all applications and click on the one you want to go to.

Use ⌘{ and ⌘} to navigate between tabs in an application.

Opening and closing new windows and tabs

In most applications, ⌘N opens new windows and ⌘T opens new tabs.

Hitting ⌘W will close the tab you’re in, or the window you’re in if there are no tabs or this was the last tab.

Unclutter

There are many strategies to keeping your desktop clean in OS X: minimizing windows, using spaces, or hiding applications.

I much prefer hiding all applications that I’m not currently using. Hit ⌘H to hide an application and all its windows. Once you navigate to that application again, it will show itself.

Sometimes hiding all windows of an application is too much; you want to have some windows visible and some hidden. In this case you can minimize the windows you don’t need by hitting ⌘M. Click on the icons of the windows to show them again.

If you really want to focus on work, there are a few other ways to give more space to your application window:

1. Hit ⌘⌥H to hide all but the current application
2. Hit ⌘⌥D to show or hide the Dock
3. Hit the little rounded rectangular icon in the top-right of most windows to show or hide the application toolbar
4. Hit ⌘↩ to go fullscreen with the application, requires installation of Megazoomer
5. Install Spirited Away and watch applications automatically hide themselves when they’re idle

Weird characters

Note: some of these require you to turn on input methods and palettes from the “System Preferences -> International -> Input Method” tab. Keyboard shortcuts for weird characters does depend on the keyboard layout you have chosen; I’m using “US” in the examples below.

Another strength of Mac OS X is that it allows you to easily input many weird characters, even using the US keyboard layout. I use this a lot when I need to type my name with the Norwegian ø. The trick is to use a couple of modifier keys: the ⌥ key sometimes in combination with the ⇧ key. Even better to see which ones are available, turn on the “Show Keyboard Viewer” which will, in real time, show what characters you can expect when you use the modifier keys.

Other easily accessible keys this way are typographic goodies such as em-dash (⌘⌥-), en-dash (⌥-), ellipsis (⌥:), or compose characters with diacritics by prepending: ⌥E for ´, ⌥` for `, ⌥U for ¨, ⌥N for ˜, and ⌥I for ˆ.

Chinese users may be a bit disappointed by the ITABC pinyin input method. In that case you can try the input methods available for download through openvanilla.org. Also note that the keyboard shortcut to switch between input methods is ⌘space which conflicts with the keyboard shortcut for Spotlight (bummer, Apple). I have mine remapped to ⌥space.

If you need some really weird characters, check out “Show Character Palette”. It is an application that allows you to search for characters by name, browse characters by category, and see similar characters. You can also mark your most commonly used weird characters as favorites for easy access.

Other

Here are some other relatively frequently used keyboard shortcuts:

• ⌘S to save documents
• ⌘R to reload documents or pages
• ⌘I to open up dialog box to view/edit detailed information
• ⌘⌥H to hide all applications except the current one
• ⌘+ and ⌘- to increase or decrease font size
• ⌘F to find something, and ⌘G to find the next occurrence
• ⌘⌫ to (permanently) delete something without throwing it into the trash can
• fn⌫ to delete character to the right of cursor
• ⌘1…9 are application specific shortcuts used to jump to different list views (Finder, Address Book), jump to different tabs (Firefox, iTerm, Colloquy, Adium), jump to different mailboxes (Mail), jump to different bookmarks (Safari), or rate items (iPhoto)

Keyboard shortcuts having to do with editing is such a big topic I’m going to cover that in a separate blog post.

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Apple has a full list of OS X keyboard shortcuts, and the Apple Blog has a nice list of OS X Hidden Gems which includes a fair number of funky keyboard shortcuts.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 03:53 and is filed under Exoweb, Mac, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.