With this solution in place, I can either summon the Butler menu with its shortcut or a tap on the lower left corner of my Magic Trackpad to pop up a menu whose first item opens my shortcuts sheet.
To make sure I can always get to my shortcut cheat-sheet quickly, I created a menu using Butler (which I summon with-you guessed it-a keyboard shortcut) and then assigned a touchpad gesture to “type” that shortcut for me using BetterTouchTool. The pop-up menu I use to open my shortcut cheat-sheet (lower right) and the actual sheet itself. How could you possibly remember them all? The honest answer is that you can’t, so you shouldn’t even try. Add in the shortcuts for your other apps, as well as those you’ve created yourself, and you could have literally thousands of keyboard combinations to remember. Consider Mail’s menus, for instance: I count 89 defined keyboard shortcuts in just that one app. One downside to being keyboard-centric is the sheer number of keyboard shortcuts that exist. (Disclaimer: I now work for the company that makes Butler.) All of these programs have a powerful mix of features, some of which include the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, there’s no rule for determining which ones will work and what won’t just give it a try and see what happens.Īnother way to keep your hands on the keyboard is through the use of launcher utilities such as Alfred ( ), Butler ( ), LaunchBar ( ), or Quicksilver ( ) and via keyboard macro programs such as Keyboard Maestro ( )or QuicKeys ( ). While you can assign your own shortcuts in most (but not all) applications, you may find that certain menu commands refuse to cooperate. Repeat as necessary, and when you’re done, you’ll find your new shortcuts in the app’s menus ready to go.
When it does, select Mail (in this example) in the first pop-up, enter the exact name of the menu command in the next box (you can type the “…” by pressing Option- ), and finally, the keyboard shortcut you’d like to create. But it’s simple to add shortcuts for the menu items I use most: Back in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences, click on Application Shortcuts in the left-hand side of the Keyboard tab, then click the Add button (+) to add a new shortcut.Ī new window will open. Unfortunately, Mail doesn’t have keyboard shortcuts for things like creating new mailboxes. Why might you want those? Consider Mail, where I use a lot of reguar and smart mailboxes to organize my ever-growing collection of email. The Keyboard tab is also where you can create application-specific keyboard shortcuts. You can easily add your own keyboard shortcuts to often-used commands that lack them. It’s similarly simple to create a new keyboard shortcut click on the light-gray None, and hit your combination of keys.
Changing an existing shortcut is as simple as clicking on the displayed keystrokes, then typing your own replacement. Choose a category in the left-hand pane, and the associated tasks show up on the right. To customize the existing shortcuts, or to add more, open the Keyboard panel in System Preferences, and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
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