One of the best ways that you can improve your productivity with your Mac is through the mastery of the many Keyboard Shortcuts. What are Keyboard Shortcuts? – These are keystroke combinations that tell a running application to perform some action. Certainly, you can use the Menu Bar to do much of the same, but moving the mouse and drilling down within the menu structure can take extra seconds.
When talking about Keyboard Shortcuts it is obvious what is meant by the alphanumeric keys listed. But what about the modifier keys? These are the key you press in addition to an alphanumeric key to take a keyboard shortcut. These are:
- Command (CMD): ⌘
- Shift (SFT): ⇧
- Option (OPT): ⌥
- Control (CTL): ⌃
- Caps Lock (CLK): ⇪
- Function (FNC): fn
Given these modifiers, the sequence of ⌘ + ⌥ + w means pressing down the Command, Option and W keys simultaneously. I’ll make my notation simpler by writing the above as CMD + OPT + w.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of Keyboard Shortcuts. More are added by Apple and by App vendors each year. From time to time I will post on my Blog about a Keyboard Shortcut. On this page, I will provide an index to those articles. I am beginning this on February 12, 2018 so it will be a few weeks or months before there are many listed here.
If there is a Keyboard Shortcut that you think I should add, please let me know.
| Editing | ||
| Cut | CMD + x | Cut selected object and copy to clipboard |
| Copy | CMD + c | Copy selected object to clipboard |
| Paste | CMD + p | Paste clipboard content to specified location |
| Paste and Match Style | SFT + OPT + CMD + v | Strips the formatting and pastes clipboard content to specified location using the locations style |
| CMD + p | Brings up the Print dialog screen to print the current content | |
| Select All | CMD + a | Select all objects in the current container |
| Undo | CMD + z | Undo last action |
| Miscellaneous | ||
| Screen capture | SFT + CMD + 3 | Capture the screen, an area of the screen or a window |
| Application Management | ||
| Quit | CMD + q | Quit current App |
| Window/Tab Management | ||
| Close | CMD + w | Closes selected window or tab |
| System | ||
| Shutdown | CTL + OPT + CMD + eject | Shutdown the system |
| Notes | ||
| Close | CMD + w | Closes current window or tab |
| Create a Link | CMD + k | Create a link for the selected text |
| Show Colors | SHT + CMD + c | Show the color palettes |
| CMD + p | Brings up the Print dialog screen to print the current content | |
| Numbers | ||
| Close | CMD + w | Closes current window or tab |
| Create a Link | CMD + k | Create a link for the selected text |
| Show Colors | SHT + CMD + c | Show the color palettes |
| CMD + p | Brings up the Print dialog screen to print the current content | |
| Pages | ||
| Close | CMD + w | Closes selected window or tab |
| Create a Link | CMD + k | Create a link for the selected text |
| Show Colors | SHT + CMD + c | Show the color palettes |
| CMD + p | Brings up the Print dialog screen to print the current content | |
| Safari | ||
| Close | CMD + w | Closes current window or tab |
| Bookmark page | CMD + d | Bookmarks the current page |
| CMD + p | Brings up the Print dialog screen to print the current content | |
| Scroll down | spacebar | While viewing a website page, scroll down a screen worth of data each time the spacebar is depressed |
| Textedit | ||
| Close | CMD + w | Closes current window or tab |
| Create a Link | CMD + k | Create a link for the selected text |
| Show Colors | SHT + CMD + c | Show the color palettes |
| CMD + p | Brings up the Print dialog screen to print the current content |
NOTE: The links for the keystrokes in the middle column go to the Blog post with more details.
John's Notes 