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Switcher Guide: Keyboard Shortcuts
Part I. Surely someone will mention others for a Part II. Like the Mac’s built-in screen shot capabilities.
In the meantime, click on for some keyboard shortcuts to get you started. Murphy’s a switcher. It took a while to get used to using the return key to rename files. Murphy’s cool with it now.
Random: Anyone remember older versions of Windows where you had to turn on Alt-Tab? Anyone remember what the feature was called?!
If you already know how to open the Apple menu with the keyboard you probably know everything in this Snippet. Otherwise click below to watch the screencast.
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6 comments to “Switcher Guide: Keyboard Shortcuts”
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3. January 2007 at 1:51 am :
When you have a folder selected, you can also *open* it with Cmd-O
In save and open dialogs, you can use cmd-s for save, cmd-. (period) for cancel,
and in Cocoa apps you can toggle the view betweeen column and list view.
You can also toggle Finder views that way. Cmd-1 for icon-view, cmd-2 for list view, cmd-3 for column view.
You can jump to an item in list (and icon & column) view by typing the first letter and even first few letters of it’s name. If you have a mydoc.doc and a mynextdoc.doc, (as long as you are in the Finder and have the containing folder selected), typing: myn , will select “mynextdoc.doc”
Another great feature similar to cmd-tab and far better than Windows does this (even with MS’s XP add-ons enhancement):
To toggle between all/every window of an application (eg: Safari, Word, etc.), press cmd-` that is, the cmd key and the key just to the left of “1″
That’s a few off the top of my head. Enjoy !
4. January 2007 at 12:25 am :
Wow. This guide could expand into a book.
There are sooooo many shortcuts and tips…
First of all, I’ve used Windows since 3.1 (released in 1992), and Alt-Tab existed since then. To be fair, my dad set up that computer, so maaaaybe Alt-Tab wasn’t on by default, but I doubt it. In any case, Windows 95 definitely had it on be default. That was one of my biggest gripes about Mac OS for the longest time. They implemented it (badly) starting in Mac OS 8.5 and it took them until 10.3 to perfect it. (I’d go into detail but this is already getting pretty rant-y. Reply you if you want all the boring details.) Speaking of which, it was off by default in 8.5–maybe that’s what you were thinking of? The one really cool thing is that most Windows keyboards put ‘alt’ where the ‘command’ key is on Macs, so no muscle retraining is required, unlike control/command-based shortcuts. (Control/command-W, Q, S, A, Z, X, C, V, F, O, P, etc.)
Kind of like command-tab, for within applications: command-` cycles through windows within applications, like the Finder or Terminal. (In the finder, when no window looks active, the Desktop is.) Firefox uses control-tab to cycle through open tabs within a window and Photoshop uses control-tab to cycle through open windows. (Ever wonder why Command-H doesn’t hide Photoshop? Because that’s been the ‘hide selection’ key since at least 5 years before OS X came out.)
Before we get too far away from command-tab: once you’ve got your little row of icons showing, you can click on any one with the mouse to switch to that app.
Great site. What software do you use to make the Flash movies? They look great and the text balloons are great too.
4. January 2007 at 2:25 am :
Great info Brian, thanks. That Photoshop one irks me!
In the ancient days of Early Windows there was a checkbox to turn on Alt-Tab. In the registry it was referred to as “CoolSwitch.”
You could configure it too:
hkey users//controlpanel/desktop/CoolSwitchColumns=6 /controlpanel/desktop/CoolSwitchRows=2
hkey users/
I’m sorry to say Murphy isn’t sharing his production secrets at this point. It’s his only competitive edge in the dog eat dog world of Mac Screencasting !
16. January 2007 at 10:57 pm :
Hey Murphy,
great guide! I’m searching for a shortcut to open a new finder window? Is there anything available to do that? On my windows and linux machines I have had a shortcut to open a file browser, but I’m missing that on the mac.
Christian
17. January 2007 at 12:18 am :
Hey Christian -
With Finder active Command+N will open a new Finder window. If you open a bunch you can hold Option and click the close button. That will close them all. Or just try Command+W over and over. Those will work with many applications.
The first post on this site talks about this a little. You probably didn’t go back that far!
-Murph
27. June 2007 at 10:45 pm :
@ Christian
i use Quicksilver and setup a custom keyboard trigger so open a new finder window from any app.