A Comprehensive Guide To Controlling Your Mac With Your Keyboard

hi this is gary with macmost.com on this special live edition of macmost i'm going to look at all sorts of different ways to control your mac with just your keyboard [Music] as always macmost is brought to you thanks to its great patreon supporters go to macmost.com patreon to learn more about the patreon campaign and join us there get course discounts and all of that so what i want to talk about today in the special live episode are all sorts of different ways to control your mac with your keyboard so you've got things like keyboard shortcuts you've got custom keyboard shortcuts you've got system stuff and hidden keyboard shortcuts you've got things like text replacements you've got custom things in different apps you've got accessibility functions all sorts of different things i have a huge list of different ways to control your mac with your keyboard each one of these could be its own episode but i'm just putting them all together here i'm just going to talk about it here in this special live edition and let's go ahead and get started notice at the bottom corner here i've got this little keyboard here it's the on-screen keyboard for your mac and the reason i have it here is that i can hold the shift key down on my keyboard and you can see the shift key is being held down there hold the command key you can see it's being held down there so as i show things i'm going to call out what keyboard shortcuts i'm using but you can also see them visually on this little keyboard here so let's start with the basics right the most basic thing for keyboard shortcuts is the keyboard shortcuts you find in the menu bar so whatever app you're using on the mac whether it's the finder a built-in app a third-party app you've got the menu bar unless it's some special utility or game or something you're going to have a menu bar here and the menu bar is part of the system the app doesn't have to build the menu bar from scratch it basically calls out to the system and says here's the menu items in the menu bar and the menu bar comes with functionality including keyboard shortcuts so in the finder for instance if i go to file i could see new finder window is command n i can see new folder is shift command n and i can see all these other keyboard shortcuts here and these are built in to each app by the developer so the developer decides on the keyboard shortcuts in this case the finder of course is from apple but if you're looking at a third-party app whoever made that app decides on those keyboard shortcuts you can see them all here and it's important to know the little special symbols here like for instance this symbol here is the command key if you look on your keyboard you'll see command there that's shift that's control and you'll find other ones as well as a matter of fact let's switch over to the keyboard here and we can see some of these here is the command key here's the control key here is option there's shift and there's one more i want to point out the fn or globe key these are known as the modifier keys on your keyboard because you don't typically use them by themselves although you can in some situations typically you modify what's going on by using this key so for instance pressing the letter c is just letter c type c but command c is usually copy so the command key modifies the c key to be a command copy and you can use these in combination so there'll be some keyboard shortcuts that aren't say command c but shift option command c and that's what we're going to be looking at a lot here if you look here at these keyboard shortcuts you can see like this is shift command n for new folder so for most things that you want to do in whatever app you're working in like here in textedit for instance you could find a keyboard shortcut if i wanted to make text bold i go to format and then i can go down to font and bold and you can see command b is the keyboard shortcut so instead of using the mouse or trackpad at all i can just use the keyboard command b will make that bold and it toggles it so command b again will take away the bolt and make it plain and that's the basics most things are going to have keyboard shortcuts in the menus here you can see how many there are i mean just about everything's got them the developer is going to figure out like which of these menu items are used the most often and it's going to make sure that they're good keyboard shortcuts there for them however sometimes there are items that don't have keyboard shortcuts and sometimes these items are things you want to use and the developer didn't think that you'd need keyboard shortcuts but you do for instance just to take an example here under format font there's outline no keyboard shortcut for outline the only way to use outline appears to be under format font outline select it using your trackpad or mouse boom you've got outline but wouldn't it be great to have a keyboard shortcut for that if you did need to use it for some reason all the time well you can customize keyboard shortcuts by going to system preferences so this is outside of the app in system preferences for the whole system you can do this if we go into system preferences here we go to keyboard here and then we go from keyboard to shortcuts and then from there we see this whole list on the left of different keyboard shortcuts we're going to be looking at this more during this live video but you'll notice different categories here that do different things a lot of these are things that don't have menu items like for instance screenshots there's no menu item control here for screenshots but there are all these screenshot commands they're kind of system wide you can think of them as hidden because they're not shown up here and this is where you control what they are whether or not they're even active at the very bottom of this list is something called app shortcuts which i think should actually be called custom shortcuts because that's what it really is this allows you to create custom shortcuts so we can go down here at app shortcuts click the plus button select which application we're creating a shortcut for now the default is all applications but rarely do you want to use that for instance we're going to create one for the outline command most apps aren't going to have an outline command it's only going to be in things where you edit text and such so let's go and select this and then go down to textedit i'm going to use a keyboard shortcut right there just to jump to t and go to textedit and say for application textedit i want to create a shortcut for outline now i need to type the menu title that's how it knows which menu item to create the custom shortcut for we want to go and double check what that is if i go into format font and there's outline look at it closely capital o and then spelled outline don't worry about the fact that it's in the font sub menu or the format menu those don't matter it's this word right here outline and getting that exactly right i have to type that perfectly so a place people get really tripped up here is actually having a menu item they want to assign a shortcut for and they type what they think is exactly the menu item but they're using the word as instead of in or they don't capitalize something and if it's not perfect it's not going to work then we're going to do the keyboard shortcut so what should we do here uh well we could do command o for outline i mean command b is for bold but probably you know that command o is standard shortcut for open so let's not use that let's use command option o and you can see it puts it right there add and now we could see it listed here command option o outline in textedit let's go back to text edit here go to format font and outline and it shows that custom shortcut there so now let's try it command option o outline and it will toggle it back and forth just like the menu item here would toggle it back and forth so that's how you add a custom shortcut getting rid of it is really easy you just go back to the same spot here you can select it you can change it if you made a mistake if you didn't get the the menu item correct you can change this if you want to try something different don't be afraid to try different shortcuts for something because a question i commonly get is how do you know if like command option o is in use by something is there a list somewhere there's no list because each app is separate and it has its own set of shortcuts but don't let that stop you don't let that go you know if you think okay option command o might work let's try it and if it turns out oh wait now i just realized option command o is used for something else then you can always go back here and change it to something else it's not like your whole machine is gonna shut down because you chose the same keyboard shortcut it's not gonna be a real problem so you can change it here you can also with it selected just hit minus and now it's gone so it's easy to add and then kind of remove it if you decide you don't want it later on so that's how you do custom keyboard shortcuts but um i want to say that you know one of the things here is that you don't always want a keyboard shortcut for everything because you can't remember them all and there's going to be more and more conflicts the more you add sometimes you just want to access things from the menu using the keyboard without the trackpad or mouse you don't need quick access to it you just want some access through the keyboard well you can access anything in the menu using the keyboard without assigning a keyboard shortcut to it it's just going to take a few more steps so first thing you want to do is you want to find a way to select things in the menu item now if you click in the menu here so i click there i have used the mouse or trackpad but now from this point on i'm only going to use the keyboard i can use the down arrow you see to go through the menu items i can use the right arrow to go into a sub menu down arrow to go here and then return and it will select that item i didn't have anything selected here let's try that again font outline return there it worked except that the first thing i had to do was click here can we eliminate that yes let's go to system preferences again and if i go into keyboard here there's an item move focus to the menu bar control f2 great let's give that a try so here i am i don't want to touch the mouse or trackpad i'm going to use ctrl f2 and you can see if you look closely the apple menu is now highlighted and if i use the right arrow it now highlights textedit file edit format then down down again font to the right down down down down return i did it without any mouse or trackpad user i didn't take my hands off the keyboard very useful when you want just keyboard control but it's not like i'm going to use outline over and over again it might be the only time i use it today or this week or this month but i just wanted to access it with the keyboard instead of using the mouse or trackpad now there are other ways to get to the menu bar i want to show you one thing first it's important it says here ctrl f2 but that's very dependent on something else if i go to keyboard here see this checkbox this checkbox determines how the f keys on your keyboard or the touch bar if you have a touch bar mac work because if you look at each of those keys there are actually two keys in one for instance the f1 and f2 keys are f1 and f2 and also screen brightness down and up other keys control volume and playback controls things like that so there are two ways to think of these one is f keys or function keys the other as special feature keys special features are like brightness volume control playback controls the symbols at the top if you have this checked then just hitting those keys will make them work as the f1 f2 and f3 keys but if you turn this off now every time you press them they're going to work as the special keys like volume control up and down you can see i'm using f11 and f12 on my keyboard here and you can see how that's working if i select these you can see how they change to the f keys the f n key i'll let y let you toggle this so if i have this off now there's special feature keys if i hold the fn key down you can see how they change on that little keyboard there at the bottom left to f keys so the fn key toggles this in a live way the checkbox is the default so having this checked means they work as f keys which are the most useful to us right now doing keyboard shortcuts but something to keep in mind great so are there other ways to access the menu yes turns out there's uh two other ways first is there's a new command in mac os monterey the fn key is actually now known as the globe key and new macs have a globe and the letters fn on the key older macs like mine just have fn which is why you see fn on that little keyboard there but if you hold that fn key down and then you press m notice the apple menu at the top left that's highlighted the fn or globe key and m works just like control f2 so a second way to get to it and maybe a little easy to remember i mean f n or globe and m m for menu right okay so there's another way there is a keyboard shortcut and we can actually look at it in system preferences here under shortcuts it is right here in app shortcuts there's one here that's not a customizable one it's always here show help menu shift command and the slash key slash also has the question mark on it so shift slash is question mark easy to remember this is command question mark and that brings up the help menu watch shift command question mark brings up the help menu now you're typing in to search help but you also have the help menu selected so instead of starting in the apple menu on the left you're starting at the help menu on the right now i can use the arrow keys and go to the left and do the same thing that i did before to select outline there i like this a little bit better partially because an older version of mac os control f2 didn't always work it worked like 98 of the time but command shift question mark worked 100 of the time and i like it because you can do other cool things with the help menu so i'm going to activate it with just the keyboard and you can see how it's searching help you would think that this if you search would give you documentation and it does if you type something in here it will show you documentation for that command but it also does something else it'll show you where a command is located so if i start typing outline notice that it shows me four menu items and these correspond to menu items that have the word outline in now now undo and redo both have outlined in them because i've recently used outline font outline is what we're looking for and there's also something called zoom out right i just typed out if i typed out and then l you can see that's gone so notice here i don't have to go to those help items i can just go down now with the down arrow and i can get to the one i want and notice it shows me where that is it's under format font outline so i can learn where it is if i've forgotten where outline is this is a way to figure it out i can learn where it is for next time or i can just activate it from this menu either by clicking under the help menu where it says font outline or hitting return so if i were to do outline i could do it like this shift command question mark start typing go down to the one i want return and you can see and turned it off i could do that with any menu item so maybe there is a keyboard shortcut but i forget what the keyboard shortcut is maybe i forget what the keyboard shortcut is for bold i do shift command question mark i start typing bold there it is down arrow return bold complete accessed everything in the menu using shift command question mark and the help menu i think this is like one of the coolest keyboard shortcuts of them all and it's one i use all the time i don't need to have access all the time to every command but i'd like to be able to get to it from the keyboard if i if i can great so let's take a look at some other things here um let's go to app switching so i have a variety of apps open now and the great thing is i can switch between them using just the keyboard the command for that is command tab and continue to hold the command key down as long as you hold the command key down after the first command tab the app switcher remains on the screen and i can switch between all of my apps if i stop on an app and lift up on the command key the app is unhidden or comes to the front command tab again and i can just tab through loops if i hold the shift key down it goes backwards and loops so i can go through each thing there easy way to switch apps you can also do other keyboard shortcuts in the app switcher so let's say i want to hide pages while i'm over it i'm still holding the command key down i can use the h key and it hides pages another h will unhide it and you can see it back there behind it's not going to bring it to the front unless i release you could also quit if i want to quit pages i can use q to quit i won't do that right now but i can use q to quit so you can go through and say q q q and q and quit a whole bunch of stuff using just the app switcher so the app switcher is kind of useful and it's all keyboard controlled but i often get asked oh how can you switch between windows here i'm going to open up another window and text editor i've got two textedit windows you can see under window here i actually have three i have one that has my notes on another screen i've got these two i can switch between windows using the command to switch windows which isn't uh okay i thought it was in there but it's not in there it isn't system preferences though uh if you go here move focus to next window command and then the little backtick key which is above the key the tab key on the keyboard here so command backtick switches to the next textedit window then the next one which is the one you can't see off screen and then the next one you could switch between windows using that so really handy to do you also of course have mission control mission control is control up arrow and this is where you access multiple desktops where you can have full screen apps so i can go for instance let's go into pages here make pages full screen i'll do control up arrow and i can see i've got desktop one and pages as two different spaces i could also say add another desktop i've got three desktops or two desktops and pages there i can use control up arrow to go here and there's really not much else i can do in here i can't use the arrow keys to do anything but if i want to switch between spaces with the keyboard i can do control right arrow and control left arrow really handy so you can have many full screen apps or many desktops and easily switch between them using control left arrow and control right arrow and let's go and get rid of all these extra desktops here let's take a look at some other things that you can do one is something called app expose which is control down arrow keyboard shortcut app expose will bring up the windows you have open in that app you can see i have two here and in many apps the recent documents at the bottom and this can be controlled by the keyboard if i use the right arrow notice how the recents here at the bottom are highlighted and i can actually select one if i want i can go up and you can see i can go between these two windows so if i had seven texted windows open a quick control down arrow and then i can use the arrow keys to go around in this list of recent and current documents and get to the one i want so really handy there a few other things i want to show you uh there's spotlight of course for app launching spotlight's really useful command space brings up spotlight right here let me center it there spotlight search now you can use spotlight to do a bunch of things keyboard only so if i want to launch an app like calculator i can just type the app name the app's usually the first thing highlighted there i can press return it launches the app command space and i can do all sorts of other things including get to system preferences if i start typing bluetooth for instance i should be able to get to the bluetooth system preferences there you go it takes a second to appear you can see there's an app there but there's also system preferences you can see it says system preferences there in the preview i can press return and get to system preferences using it and of course also you could get two files so you know i can do you know test.txt and i could find the file that way quick way to navigate to a file without having to you know use the finder at all so spotlight is a very handy keyboard only technique for finding things and if you want to go like through the items here like oh maybe this file isn't the one i want i can go down arrow i can go to this one command down arrow jumps down to the next section you get a preview on the right if you don't see a preview to the right you can usually use the right the or the tab to show it but there's nothing to show here in this case you can get to things like searching the web so you can actually do a web search here without launching the browser first and i could search the web for test.txt if i wanted to for some reason or start a finder search here as well there's some other cool things you can do for instance if i wanted to get to this file and i don't want to open the file i just want to see where it is i can use command r here in spotlight it'll open up a new finder window and take me there so that's kind of cool you can do things like if you wanted to look up a word you can do i think command l let's see i thought command l shift command l option command l i thought it took you to the definition command b will do a search with whatever you had in spotlight so you could start a web search by simply command space you type the search what you want to search and do command b and there you are in your default browser searching so some cool things to do in spotlight but i don't actually like the idea of using spotlight to launch apps why well remember when i typed calc and you can see there it took a second for calculator to appear as the first item a better way to do it is launchpad now launchpad is down here you have to go to the dock and click it some of us have keys on our keyboard that are specific for launchpad the newer macs don't but you can go into system preferences and then you can go to keyboard and then one of the things here launchpad and doc show launchpad and i've set it here to control spacebar you're going to have to set it something i believe it's blank by default and then make sure it's turned on so instead of command spacebar for spotlight i do control spacebar for pad now i know some of you are like oh launch pad it's it's a mess i don't use launchpad i'm suggesting not to use it by clicking with the mouse or trackpad but use it just like you would spotlight so in spotlight if i wanted to run calculator i do command space calc wait for calculator to appear return there's calculator now let me do the same thing with launchpad i've got control space calc and you can see how it narrows it down return and calculator launches the difference being it doesn't seem to have any delay and it's only apps right you're not going to get documents and dictionary definitions and you know sports scores and all that stuff it's just for apps so i like setting a keyboard shortcut and using launchpad to launch apps but let's look at one other thing you can do down here the dock of course has your most common apps you can actually do a lot in the dock with just the keyboard to access the dock you've got to go in in system preferences let's see under shortcuts launch pad and dock you can turn dock hiding on and off here with option command d which is really useful but move focus to dock is usually control f3 so let's do that control f3 and it brings up the dock and notice how the finder is selected i can use the arrow key to move to what i want and let's say i want to launch reminders return and reminders launches that's kind of handy you can also use one of those new function keys fn or the globe key and d and it should get you the dock not sure why it's not right there well let's just stick with ctrl f3 and notice how it stays on reminders too it doesn't go back to the finder plus you can access other things in the dock so for instance i can go and go up and i can get the menu for reminders for contacts for calendar and you can go down into options you can use the arrow keys to access all this stuff so some of these have special functions like here in safari i can go to a window in safari create a new window a new private window show all windows i can quit right from the dock launch pad i go up and actually i get the list of all the apps in alphabetical order i can use a key to jump to a letter so that's kind of handy finder it's got all sorts of extra you know favorites and common things in here so you have like full doc access using the keyboard control f3 i'm pretty sure that fn and d is supposed to do the same thing or the glow key and d is supposed to do the same thing oh no it's not f n and d it is fn and a fn and d turns on and off dictation we're going to look at that in a minute here actually because that's kind of interesting so fn and a is doc or control f3 either one and you have complete control doc doc is great as a switcher as a launcher and being able to do various different things in the doc now let's take a look at keyboard navigation when you're talking about text because that's a whole other thing let's go back here to text edit and i want to edit text and this is a primary spot where i want to keep my hands on the keyboard because if i'm typing i don't want to have to lift off both my hands maybe i have them on the home row you know maybe that's how i type every time i touch the mouse or keyboard it kind of you know puts me off and i have to get back into typing mode so you can do a lot with just the keyboard obviously you can use the arrow keys left and right to move the cursor and this blinking line here you can see just before the word jumps between after fox right there that's actually the cursor this is actually the pointer anything you move with the the track pattern mouse the pointer this is the cursor text cursor so i can move back and forth and it's really handy when editing text because sometimes you want to go back add a word here or whatever if you hold the option key down it will jump by word because if you have a lot of text it's tough to you know backspace over everything let's actually open up a recent file here something with more text in it there we go and i'm going to make this a little bigger so you can see it if i'm here i want to like backspace all the way you know i can hold down the left arrow key and it'll eventually get there but option will go by word so option left goes by word option right goes by word much faster if you're editing text to use option left and right to get where you want you can also use down and up to jump by line but option down will go to the end of the current paragraph or if you're already at the end it'll go to the end of the next paragraph option up goes to the beginning of the current paragraph and the next time it goes to the beginning of the previous paragraph so you can jump through your text pretty quickly with option up and down um you've got lots of other cool things you can do in text editing you can do if you have home and end buttons on your keyboard if you have an extended keyboard you could do end to go to the end at home to go home it just scrolls it doesn't change where the cursor is but if you don't have those you still can use the fn key and i believe it's let's see left and right left goes home right goes end now page up and page down if you have those actually does move the cursor and it scrolls through you can use fn and down arrow and up arrow as page up page down so there are handy to use um you've got selection if you want to select something let's say okay i'm going to use the keyboard go here and let's say i want to make this bold i need to select it first i can hold the shift key down and right arrow oh i hit an extra key there shift right arrow and keep right arrowing and select something as long as the shift key is held down it will extend the selection if i lift up the shift key and use the arrow you can see the selection goes away i can use that conjunction with any of those other shortcuts so option shift right arrow selects this word next word next word next word very quickly now i can command b to bold that so if you want to do the same thing with like option shift down arrow you know you can go by paragraph that kind of thing so really handy to know those and that shift can help you do the the selection there's some weird ones too there's an old program called emacs that was for terminals and you still have still have it actually i don't know if you have it anymore in terminal on a mac but it's a text editor that was in the terminal days before mouse mice and keyboards were around and there were some standard keyboard controls there because they didn't have a lot of terminals didn't have arrow keys and stuff so a lot of those still work in most mac text editing apps so for instance if i do control the control key not command and b it goes back f goes forward if i do a it goes up or the beginning of the paragraph and e to the end of the paragraph if i do p it goes up line and down line if i do control and h it deletes so another way to use a delete key is control h ever want forward delete on a mac i know windows users you know switched i really want forward delete well you can do control and d for forward delete also you can use the delete key on your mac with the fn key held down so fn and delete is forward delete that's what i would use although as a lifelong mac user i never forward delete it only seems to be windows users that need that you also have other ways to deal with things one is oh this is a weird one ctrl t transposes two letters so you see the t and h there with a blinking cursor between them control t transposes them okay ctrl o is kind of useful control o inserts a new line at this location but leaves the the cursor there if i do return you can see the cursor is the next line if i do control o it creates a new paragraph but the cursor is still at the old paragraph and finally there's you probably know obviously you can do copy and paste if i select something i can copy i can cut i can paste i can use the keyboard shortcuts for that so command x will cut and command v will paste there are emax commands for the same thing but it's not the same thing it's going to use a different buffer so if i select some text like that and i use ctrl k for kill it deletes what's there but puts it in a buffer now if i do ctrl y it yanks it from the buffer and puts it back k and y kill and yank but it's different than copy and paste so if i were to copy say this word command c and kill this word ctrl k and then go here and do command v to paste and then do control y to yank you can see it's getting it from two different places kind of neat stuff um let's that's pretty much most of what i want to show for text stuff i do want to point out there's text replacements as well so let's switch back here and let's say i go to system preferences again into keyboard and change to text and then look at text replacements and you can see i've got some set here the idea is you hit plus here you type something that you would never in a million years type normally like maybe stumps a word starting with an exclamation point you know an abc and then over here you type you know something else and it could be you know long it could be a whole paragraph or whatever it is you want and now whenever i'm in a text entry kind of mode i can type this exactly and then the next thing i press space or return or whatever it replaces it really handy i mean you could put like a bunch of paragraphs in there sometimes what you want to do is like take this and copy it and then go here and then you go in and you you know paste it in here and you know then it's like several lines of text you could always select it and remove it i'll remove that one i've got some other stuff set here like uh the exclamation point thanks does this entire thing here um you can have you know just a single character like an emoji pizza character you know so like let's try these if i do you know thanks and then return it put that whole thing in there quick way to respond to an email uh pizza like that or was that the uh oh it's a dot pizza yeah dot pizza does that so now i don't have to remember how to get to the you know that emoji if i do that all the time it's kind of handy um so yeah some more uh mac shortcuts here oh before i finish completely with text let's go over to pages i want to show you one interesting thing in pages say i want to change a style to something i want to make this say title style i can click here make a title style there is a way to set a keyboard shortcut for that if you go here and you go to title oh sorry here and then i click on this little arrow there you can see there's a shortcut and i can set an f key from f1 to f8 as a shortcut here so i can easily set that the same thing for character styles i bring this over so i can set a character style like here's the emphasis character style i could do shortcut and that's underneath me but you can see how that is just f1 to f8 same thing for keynote and numbers so really handy if you have a certain style you want to use for emphasis you know it's like maybe a color and a font and a size and it's bold you know you could set like that as f4 and then you know select text and hit f4 for it works in pages numbers and keynote if you're using something else like microsoft word microsoft word has its own whole universe of like macros and keyboard shortcuts that you can customize inside the app all right let's go i'm going to go into finder now and show you how you can control all sorts of other things with the keyboard for instance here i am in the finder and i've got you know window open and i can of course click on things i want i can open up these folders i can double click on a file here to open it but this can all be controlled by the keyboard as well so i'll move the pointer to the side i'm going to use the arrow keys if i go down you see immediately it's going to select the first thing there i can continue to go down i can go to the right and open something up i'm in list view if i was in column view it would go down into a column there right and left i can go to one of these files i can if i press return that's rename but if i were to do command o it opens up the file so really handy let me switch back using the app switcher there to this and you can see i could do all sorts of things using the keyboard i can navigate around in the finder even in like icon view i can navigate around here if i want to open a folder command o will open it up if i'm going to go back up command up arrow goes up a level it's one of the most useful commands when using a finder let's see here uh there you can use also even for like throwing things away like you know let's uh go here in the finder go in here and do command o if i want to delete this how do i drag it to the trash well if you look here under file you can see that you've got move to trash it's command delete so i can use command delete to delete the file you can also do things let's go into safari here and let's talk about tabs so let's open up a new tab in safari and another tab in safari i've got several safari tabs control tab so the control key and tab lets you go between tabs so you think of like command tab lets you go between apps control tab lets you go between tabs shift well you know control shift tab you can go backwards so you can navigate around tabs but that also works in other apps so i have a second tab here command t to open up a new tab and control tab lets me go between these tabs here inside of finder and then there's also if you look here there's something called tab overview or show alt tab shift command and backslash so shift command backslash brings up all the tabs and you even have the ability to um you know add a new one there let's see i'm not getting good that doesn't seem like oh i can use control tab here to go between these so same thing here in safari shift command up arrow let's see here was that shift control up arrow let's take a look tab overview should be show tab overview shift command and backslash now i guess that's not what i was doing before and now i can't use the arrow keys here but i can control tab oh control tab is actually going to work inside this but i can search tabs so you know i can bring it down to this and get to a tap so not great in terms of keyboard access there but something to keep in mind oh what else have we got oh um let's say i am going to save something i'm going to go into textedit here again let's create a new document and i'm going to save it brings up the save dialog so this is a typical dialog save dialogs print dialogs things that come up that you have to deal with right now and you've got buttons like save cancel that kind of thing any button that's blue like this if i do return it's going to activate it so i could type a new name and hit return and i can use this entire thing without ever having to go uh to the track pattern mouse if i want to cancel though there are two ways to do that one is the escape key the escape key will cancel another is command period that activates cancel right there so you have the ability to do that um also if you are say going to quit something that's uh you know if i were to quit command q you see it says oh you haven't saved this i can hit return for save and it'll save with that file name command period for cancel and it won't quit if i want delete command delete will actually activate a delete key here really handy one if you want to create something quick in uh text edit but you're done with it you don't want it anymore you quit and it says oh do you want to save this you don't have to navigate to delete you can do command delete i'll do command period to cancel there um let's see when you have any pop any menu like this see that's like for selecting fonts you may think you need to use the cursor or the mouse rather for this but you can actually can anytime you're in here it's like oh this is a long list i want to jump right to the w's for the fonts hit w see it jumps right down and then you can use the arrow keys to go up and down so you know helvetica i can type h e and athletic is there at the top let's do it's a copper plate c-o-p and you can see how it jumps right there and i could you know go up and down as i want any kind of list anything even like let's do like format see this here if i'm going to go to outline i can go to o or actually i have to go into this menu i go to o and it jumps down to it always remember you can use letters in different drop-down and pop-up menus to jump around it's really handy especially if you know your alternative is just hitting the down arrow key a whole bunch of times let's go into you know i brought up this browser here with a form and notice that there's you know a bunch of fields here you can use the tab key to jump around and stuff so let me reload this page here let's say okay a business question with this form if i use the tab key notice it selects the first item i could go down to the next one go down to the next one and you can use tab and shift tab to go back and forth and it's a really handy way to navigate around in complex forms in most apps but most of the time you run into forms it's in the web browser i mentioned the new shortcut keys for various things before you have control or sorry fn or the globe key and m for the menu bar you've got fn and a for the doc you also have fn and c for control center really handy and you can't do anything else so you can't down arrow unfortunately and select things in control center although i'm going to show you a way that you kind of can later on you can um there's a lot uh probably coming in the future i think with this i think this is the beginning notification center is fn and n and it brings it up which is handy even though you can't navigate around because sometimes you just want to see stuff like times or news or you know the weather or whatever and you know fn and n to open and close the notification center it's really handy i said uh f globe key and d for dictation for most apps you can go to you know enter full screen is now globe and f so if i'm going to take this window here full screen globe and f globe enough to get out of it emoji viewer if i want to type this you probably know the old keyboard shortcut ctrl command space and it brings it up but you can also do fn or globe key and e for emoji so that's really handy so those are some good things to know now how about some other stuff a lot of cool things you can do with the keyboard go from the shortcuts app so let's launch the shortcuts app now the shortcuts app i can create shortcuts and they don't have to be complex shortcuts i'm creating a new one here and let's say i just want to launch an app that's it i want to have a keyboard shortcut to launch an app so i type launch here comes up with open app that's fine use that let me click here to select the app which app do i want to launch let's do calculator open calculator and this will call this launch calculator and now i have a shortcut that will work let's do it with the keyboard click here i'm going to say add keyboard shortcut i'm going to do control option command c for it and hope that nothing conflicts with that notice it says use this quick action services menu that becomes live once i assign this keyboard shortcut let's hide shortcuts here and if i look in textedit services i see launch calculator now because it's a service member and there's the keyboard shortcut so now in anything finder services and see i don't see it there launch calculator i don't see it with the keyboard shortcut which may indicate that there is a conflict let's go back into shortcuts and let's change this to uh shift control option command c and wow that let's not do that let's add keyboard shortcuts try it again all right all those things and then let's go back to finder and see yep now now it shows there's no conflict there so great i'm in any app i want finder for instance i do all of that it's going to launch calculator because it's going to run that shortcut now you can do all sorts of things with this like let's change this to instead of launching or opening calculator i could open file open file i could select a file to open so if there's some file like every day i write into like a diary or log file or something i can actually assign a keyboard shortcut that opens up that file on the default app i could do all sorts of different things i could have it you know speak the time let's uh do that uh date and there we go speak speak text one goes into the other um i can change some things about it i've still still calling it launch calculator fix that later right now if i use the keyboard shortcut june 3rd 2022 at 10 49 a.m i assume you can hear that it was loud enough um hey so if you you know ever want to you know have a keyboard shortcut where it'll tell you the time um there you go all sorts of stuff i mean you could even do like if i do quit i do quit app but i could say quit not an app but all apps except you know zoom don't quit zoom now i have a keyboard shortcut for like oh my goodness i forgot i have a zoom meeting right now it's starting i've got stuff all over my desktop run this shortcut everything quits i'm not focused on zoom so there's like things you can do like that so don't look past shortcuts for doing things combining things launch two apps launch open two files open four files that you need all sorts of different things you can do in shortcuts so deep here and you can control it with just the keyboard universally on your mac like that some other stuff let's go into system preferences there is some stuff where you can do keyboard control let's go into keyboard keyboard uh let's go to uh let's see in shortcuts use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls so let's go that's off right now and if i go to safari here and i'm in this window and i do tab it's going to tab between these things and it's also going to hit some other stuff here's another field over here it's going to you know do various things let's go to say you know the macmost homepage and i can do tab and it's going to go between various things here now if i turn this on you use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls then it's going to actually go to different things in here should maybe let's take a look at textedit for a better example text edit it's not going to be good because it's going to go between these so i think if i tab here i'm just going through files i thought safari would be a good example of this oh you can see now when i tap through you can solve see how it highlighted those controls up here as i tab there you go so i can tap between various things with that on but if i have that off it's not going to do the same it's not going to tab between those items so you can use this to have more focus between controls as you use tab and use keyboard navigation tab and shift tab but there's like an ultimate you know higher level to this if i go this is new in monterey if i go to accessibility i go to full keyboard access so i'm going to go in here to keyboard enable full keyboard access i've got options here there's various things i can do and there's all these commands and this is actually going to turn the tab key into a modifier key see how this is highlighted all the files are highlighted that's the control i have selected now but if i do tab and i do say tab h oh it's it is doing it on the wrong screen see if i get it on the right screen tab h no it's still going to do it on the wrong screen probably have to close everything with the finder interesting okay so tab h usually brings up controls here but unfortunately it's doing it on a screen i'm not using so i can't really show you that but it allows you to do lots of things like for instance i can move forward between items notice how it's up here it's moving all through these items here just tabbing forward it gives me much more control over what basically almost anything i can click i can get to if i have enable full keyboard access turned on and i can activate anything up that's highlighted with the space if i'm inside of a group so it shows a bunch of files i can use the arrow keys let's see if i can get back here so see how i'm inside a group here now i can use the tab to get to that group and arrow keys to move around in it and space actually will then select things this takes some practice i don't think this is meant to be like something you occasionally use this is something you use all the time and you really get used to but it's definitely something you should know about um and that you should uh you know if you really want full keyboard access you can use i believe if you're using full keyboard access then you can do fn and c for control center and then i can tab and see how i can use control center now shift tab to go back i can go you know to something else let's see display and i can do up and down arrow so you can control control center and other things if you have full keyboard access turned on so something for you to play around with let's go and look at some other cool things mouse keys another accessibility function is mouse keys if you want to control everything with the keyboard you can do pointer control alternate control methods enable mouse keys and now if you look under options here there's some options now the keys 7 8 and 9 are used let's see no it's not going to do it hold on keyboard pointer control mouse keys i full keyboard access off oh because i have a i'm sorry i have a numeric keypad if you have a numeric keypad it uses the numeric keypad if you don't have a numeric keypad it's going to use other keys i think it tells you in the help here i believe it's 789 uio jkl as kind of a track pad of keys with i being clicking with my keyboard here i'm actually use you know the i have the numeric keypad i'm actually using the one two three four five six seven eight nine there and a five for clicking so i can actually hold the 8 key down go up hold the 7 key down go to the left and turn it off by clicking with the 5. there you go so not that handy really unless your track pad or mouse is broken and you need to be able to do something like right now while you wait to get a new one um let's see uh up some quick things i want to show you i showed you screenshots before but i think it's worth looking at again screenshots a lot of people like these are some of my least favorite keyboard shortcuts these because these are the old ones this one here does everything shift command 5 brings up this whole set of controls here and let you choose all of your options so certainly if you need to save the picture of the screen as a file and need to do it over and over and over again really quickly then learn this keyboard shortcut but if it's occasionally you need to do it forget these four keyboard shortcuts and just know shift command 5 to access all screen capture and recording options here's a cool thing i often get asked hey it looks like you can do everything with keyboard shortcuts except assign tags to files right i want to assign a tag to this file if i go under file you can see there's tags dot dot dot great i want to bring that up with a keyboard shortcut app shortcuts plus let's do tags dot dot in what finder keyboard shortcut option command t great now that should work right i go back to finder let's look file tags nope it's not applied it doesn't work the tags dot dot seems to like buck the whole trend and not be usable except you can use it here's what you got to do you go to finder preferences you go to tags here in tags see these favorite tags you got to get rid of them drag each one out until there are no favorite tags left anymore favorite tags are just something you click anyway any tags that you want to see really easily just check them here okay now when i go to file tags the favorites are gone and tags dot dot dot has the keyboard shortcut so command t there it is those items that i selected with those check marks they're right underneath and i can arrow down to them and easily assign them and i could easily just type so you can see like that so super easy now to apply tags using keyboard shortcut the trick was in preferences to get rid of the favorites out of this box another thing is keyboard navigation in the finder you know you've got the sidebar here you can't access that with keyboard shortcuts but the go menu has a ton of common locations you can jump to like your home folder like desktop like documents and all of that in addition you can use go to folder shift command g like that and type a path and the path doesn't have to be perfect like i can start typing doc for documents and it's going to kind of try to figure out what it is i want to do so it should let's help it out here it should come up with documents right there oops let's do tilda slash documents so you can see how it goes to it like that but now in the future let's see if i just type documents because it's recent you see now it's got those selected so shift command g and typing allows you to get anywhere in the finder kind of like you're using terminal um another thing i want to point out as you know kind of want to finish this off here i if you go to system preferences keyboard there's this button for modifier keys this allows you to change the modifier keys and control the caps lock key so for instance i've got caps lock set to be an fn key an additional fn key because my keyboard has it all the way over on the right because it's an extended keyboard so i now have an fn key where the caps lock key is but i could set it to caps lock i could set it to no action and kill the caps lock key or i can make it another command key or whatever i want you could switch control with command the command with control if you like i don't recommend doing that but it's useful to know you have those functions here another thing i want to point out is the video here i want to show you a video not going to have time to show you this but i've got this special video i did a while ago on key bindings key bindings are a super advanced technique for keyboard shortcuts basically when you touch a key on your keyboard it sends a signal to your mac that says this key was pressed the mac looks that up in a table and says oh you press the letter a what am i supposed to do with that oh the letter a means you've typed a and that's what happens you can get in between that and basically say no no the letter a no longer means a it means something else and you do that with key bindings and i show you how in this video i'll link to it or you can just search for this uh you know search macmost key bindings this should come up first um and there's some interesting things because there are like keys that map to functions like you know obviously the modifier keys or pressing the up arrow or the home button or things like that there are some functions that are not mapped to from any key on the keyboard that do some special things and you can map something to it so you can you know do some cool stuff it's it's pretty advanced you have to edit these little system files they're not system files they're actually user library files so you're not changing the system you're changing your user account but um but it's worth looking at even if you think you might not use it check that out the last thing i want to point out is you might run out of keys right i mean how many keyboard shortcuts can you possibly assign well a couple ways to get more keys on your keyboard one way is to get a control surface you can buy like an expensive thing people that stream and you know do music and video editing have like these control decks that are like extra buttons and you plug it in and it creates these extra buttons and they've got software and they could do like shortcuts with the software midi keyboard sometimes you can do stuff like that if you have an extended keyboard one with the numeric keyboad on the right each one of those number keys is actually a different key than the number keys at the top of the keyboard so you could assign a keyboard shortcut to say command numpad 2 numpad2 different than the number two and then you now have like all of these extra keys i mean you've got nine keys and then you can do command you can do control you can do option you can do option command control command all of that a lot of keyboard shortcuts you can assign to a extended keyboard and not interfere with all the letters and other default keyboard shortcuts if you don't have an extended uh keyboard you can always get one of these you get wired little keypads for 20 bucks 30 bucks for like a bluetooth one and basically it just adds a second keyboard to your mac you can have multiple keyboards on your mac um but this adds one that has the num keys and other things uh on it and then you can assign keyboard shortcuts using those so if you find say you're using garageband edit music or imovie to do stuff and you really want to have keyboard shortcuts and you want to do it cheaply without buying like a 200 you know stream deck thing with buttons on it you can get like a 20 keypad plug that in and assign keyboard shortcuts to that so um that's a ton of stuff well i didn't even get to every single thing i wanted to talk about but i think this gives you plenty to investigate if you like using keyboard shortcuts i hope you've enjoyed this episode and you know thanks for watching bye [Music] bye

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 51,925

Keywords: mac keyboard shortcuts, custom mac keyboard shortcuts, mac keyboard access, controlling a mac with the keyboard, mac keyboard control, mac keyboard navigation, mac modifier keys

Id: lEOG_vmDzk8

Length: 63min 32sec (3812 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022