One thing that can be a major boost to how productive you are on your computer are the use of keyboard shortcuts. These are performed by pressing a number of keys at once to perform common actions, and are often much quicker than doing the equivalent action using the mouse.
Many people will be aware of some of the most common Windows shortcuts such as using Ctrl-C for Copy and Ctrl-V for paste, however if you use a Mac you may have noticed that these particular shortcuts require a different combination of keys than they do on a Windows PC.
As a rule of thumb, if you are coming across from Windows to OS X, you pretty much just need to swap the Ctrl key for the CMD key. This ranges from things such as copy and paste, which on a Mac are accomplished by pressing CMD-C and CMD-V respectively, to things such as changing the format of text on a document, CMD-B for Bold, CMD-I for Italics and CMD-U for underlining etc.
The CMD key can also be used in combination with other modifier keys such as the Ctrl and Option keys in order to perform system functions. Unfortunately there are probably around two to three hundred different shortcuts you could use every day, and learning them can be a little challenging, so I’ve rounded up what I think to be the most useful for you below. Learn these and see if you like using them, then you can start to learn the rest!
The Classics
Here you will find the most basic and probably most commonly used shortcuts, they can be used almost universally across most applications:
- CMD-C is your copy function.
- CMD-V is how you paste what's on your clipboard.
- CMD-P allows you to start printing.
- CMD-O allows you to open a document within an application.
- CMD-Z is for undoing that last change.
- CMD-Y is for redoing what you have undone.
- CMD-S is for saving your work.
System shortcuts
Here you’ll find quick access to functions within OS X itself, these ones are specific to Macs and should allow you to do some actions much quicker than usual.
- CMD+Tab will allow you to cycle through open apps.
- CMD+Option+D allows you to Show or Hide the dock at the bottom of the screen.
- CMD+Space opens up the Spotlight search, from here you can type any file or app and hit enter to open.
- CMD+Q will quit whatever app you currently are in.
- CMD+Option+Esc is perhaps the nearest equivalent to the Ctrl-Alt-Del from Windows, in that it will bring up a list of any open apps and allow you to close any that are unresponsive or have crashed.
- CMD+Option+Eject will put your Mac immediately to sleep.
- Ctrl+Shift+Eject will put just the display to sleep, but keep the Mac awake.
- CMD+Shift+3 will take a snapshot of your entire screen, and save it as a file on to your desktop.
- CMD+Shift+4 will allow you to click and drag a selection box onto the screen. When you hear the camera ‘snap’ noise, the image file has saved to your desktop.
- CMD+Option+⏏ will quickly shut your Mac down, asking you if you want to save any unsaved work in the process.
- Cmd+Ctrl+⏏ will quickly restart your Mac, asking if you wish to save unsaved work in the process.
USE RECOVERY
If you’re running OSX Lion or Mountain Lion, there is a special chunk of your hard drive dedicated to recovery. From here you can use some of the utilities you will find in the Utilities folder , and reinstall your copy of OSX. To do this, hold the R key as you power on your Mac, which will launch the recovery partition instead of booting you into your normal OSX installation.
Finding other shortcuts
There are a couple of ways to find out more shortcuts to use within OS X, one way to check out Apple’s extensive list, however this is enormous and will probably take a long while to digest and remember. One easier way that I use instead is to actually look in the menu bar of the app that you’re currently in. In the image above you can see some good examples of how OS X shows you keyboard shortcuts – they’re always on the right hand side of the menu bar item. Using the above as an example, we can easily see that a quick shortcut to the utilities folder is to press Shift-CMD-U, or to quickly go to your documents folder you can press Shift-CMD-O. You will find these shortcuts in almost every menu bar item in OS X, as well as any app that uses the menu bar to store functions. You can slowly build up your knowledge of the shortcuts simply by using the menu bar, and eventually you may find yourself using them much more often.
I hope you find these quick shortcuts useful, and you now know where to find any other shortcuts too. For any other help with these elements, you can get in touch with us 24x7.