keyboard shortcut - MacTech Solutions

Text Replacements Not Working on the Mac? Check This Setting

Terry McAdams — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:15:19 +0000

Apple provides a handy ecosystem-wide feature that replaces a typed abbreviation—say “eml”—with text you specify, like your email address. (Seriously, copy that one so you don’t have to type your email address repeatedly.) These automatic text replacements sync via iCloud so you can use them on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Find them on the Mac in System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements and on the iPhone and iPad in Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. They’re great, but it can be mysterious when they stop working on the Mac. The culprit? A menu item being turned off. So, if text replacements aren’t working in a particular app, choose Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement to turn them back on.

(Featured image by iStock.com/tookitook)

Social Media: Apple’s built-in text replacement feature expands a short abbreviation you type into something longer, but a simple menu option can prevent it from working in a Mac app. Here’s how to fix it.

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Insert Emoji More Easily with Text Replacements

Terry McAdams — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 15:05:51 +0000

For many of us, emoji are fun, but we don’t want to choose Edit > Emoji & Symbols whenever we want to insert one. A faster, better technique is to set up text replacements for emoji you insert often. Open System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements, click the + button at the bottom, and enter the “trigger” text you want to type and the emoji you want entered. You can set the trigger to anything you like, but we prefer the Slack convention of a colon and a few characters from the emoji name, such as :roll for 🙄. Bonus: these replacements sync between your Mac, iPhone, and iPad!

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(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Yosi Azwan)

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Open the Mac’s Control Center with This Obscure Keyboard Shortcut

Terry McAdams — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 14:10:48 +0000

With macOS 13 Ventura, Apple brought Control Center from iOS to the Mac, providing a unified interface for features that users need to turn on and off regularly or that receive frequent adjustments, like screen brightness and audio volume. Clicking the Control Center icon in the menu bar brings it up, but it’s a small, hard-to-hit target. For faster and easier access to Control Center from within any app, press fn-C. (All current Apple keyboards have an fn key, but if you’re using a third-party keyboard that lacks one, you’re out of luck.)

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

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Mac Keyboard Shortcuts Performing Unexpected Actions? Check These Settings

Terry McAdams — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 13:37:14 +0000

Keyboard shortcuts are a productivity win, but they can cause confusion if something unexpected happens when you accidentally press some system-wide key combination. For instance, you might be taken aback if you accidentally press Control-Option-Command-8 and all the colors on your Mac screen suddenly invert. Although Apple has pages listing shortcuts and the KeyCue utility can list them all for any app, a good way to see—and manage—what’s active on any Mac is to open System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts (look in the same place in System Preferences in macOS 12 Monterey and earlier) and scan the categories. Disable shortcuts you’ll never use by deselecting their checkboxes, and redefine others so you’ll remember them.

(Featured image by iStock.com/spaxiax)

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Reveal Your Desktop Quickly with a Keyboard Shortcut

Terry McAdams — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 13:07:35 +0000

The Mac’s Desktop is a remarkably useful place. It’s a good spot for in-progress documents, screenshots, images dragged out of Web pages, and more. However, app windows tend to obscure the Desktop, making it harder to use. There are two quick ways you can temporarily hide windows, making it easy to access icons on the Desktop. In macOS 13 Ventura, in System Settings > Desktop & Dock, click the Shortcuts button at the bottom and assign a keyboard shortcut to Show Desktop (we like the Right Option key). Or click Hot Corners and choose Desktop for one of the corners. (In macOS 12 Monterey and earlier, look in System Preferences > Mission Control.) Then, press that keyboard shortcut or put your pointer in that corner to move your windows aside temporarily. When you’re done, press the key or move the pointer there again to put the windows back.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/AmnajKhetsamtip)

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The Mac’s Magic Shortcut to Trashing Files and Photos Quickly

Terry McAdams — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 13:27:18 +0000

Sure, you could select a file in the Finder and choose File > Move to Trash or drag it to the Trash in the Dock. Similarly, you can trash selected photos in Apple’s Photos app by choosing Image > Delete X Photos, or by pressing the Delete key, but both of those methods result in a dialog asking if you’re sure. The easiest way of trashing a file in the Finder or a picture in Photos is to select it and press Command-Delete. Poof, it’s in the Trash (Finder) or Recently Deleted album (Photos), with no extra effort or prompts! And if you accidentally trash the wrong thing, just press Command-Z to restore it. Keep this key combination in mind for other apps too, since they may also support it as a shortcut for “delete without prompting.”

(Featured image by iStock.com/YurolaitsAlbert)

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Learn How to Paste Text So Its Style Matches the Surrounding Text

Terry McAdams — Tue, 11 May 2021 12:11:31 +0000

When you copy text from a Web page, PDF, or word processing document, macOS usually includes the associated formatting, so the words you paste may end up in 68-point blue italic if that was what the source text looked like. That’s often undesirable. More commonly, you want the text to take on the styling of the text where you’ve pasted it. In most Mac apps, there’s a quick trick to achieve this goal. Look on the Edit menu for the Paste and Match Style command (sometimes called Paste and Match Formatting, Paste Text Only, or Paste without Formatting) to paste the text such that it matches the style of the surrounding words in the destination. Apple’s standard keyboard shortcut for this is Command-Shift-Option-V, though some apps use Command-Shift-V. If you regularly need this capability in an app that lacks native support for it, consider using a clipboard utility app, like Keyboard Maestro, to make your own universal Paste Text Only hotkey.

(Featured image based on an original from Pixabay)

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Make Your Own Keyboard Shortcuts on the Mac

Terry McAdams — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 18:33:42 +0000

Power users like keyboard shortcuts because it’s faster to press a couple of keys than to navigate lengthy menus. If you have trouble remembering shortcuts, check out KeyCue, which displays a concise table of all currently available shortcuts. But what about menu items that lack shortcuts? Make your own in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. Click the + button, choose an app from the Application menu, fill in the Menu Title field, click the Keyboard Shortcut field, press your desired key combination, and click Add. You can even make shortcuts for Safari bookmarks, since they appear in the Bookmarks menu. If a shortcut doesn’t work, make sure you typed its menu title exactly right, including any punctuation like three periods for an ellipsis. To edit an item, double-click its title or shortcut in the list. If you no longer want an item, select it and click the – button.

(Featured image by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash)

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Two Secret Key Combos for Forward Delete on the Magic and MacBook Keyboards

Terry McAdams — Sat, 14 Sep 2019 13:41:07 +0000

Traditionally, extended keyboards come with a Forward Delete key that, when you press it, deletes characters to the right of the insertion point, unlike the main Delete key, which deletes to the left of the insertion point. Forward Delete still exists on Apple’s Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, but it’s missing from the Magic Keyboard and all Mac laptop keyboards. If you like using Forward Delete (and well you should!), the secret key combinations that simulate it for any Apple keyboard that lacks it are Fn-Delete and Control-D. You can often add Option to the mix to delete the word to the right of the insertion point instead of just a character.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

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Apple’s Mac Reminders App Is More Capable Than You May Realize

Lucy McAdams — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 12:30:45 +0000

With Apple’s productivity apps like Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders, which look and work pretty much the same on the Mac and in iOS, what you see is largely what you get. Particularly in iOS, they tend not to have much in the way of hidden depths.

With Reminders, however, Apple’s engineers snuck some surprising little features into the Mac version. We like using Siri on the iPhone, Apple Watch, and HomePod to add items to our iCloud-synced Reminders to-do lists and shopping lists whenever we think of them. And then, when we’re at our Macs, all those reminders are waiting for us. Here are some useful tricks on the Mac that you may not have noticed.

Open List in New Window

By default, Reminders is a single-window app with a sidebar that shows all your lists. You can hide the sidebar to focus on a single list at a time, at which point you navigate between lists by clicking the dots at the bottom of the screen or swiping on a trackpad.

But what if you want to see multiple lists at once? You can open any list in its own window by double-clicking it in the sidebar or by choosing Window > Open List in New Window. Resize and position that window as you like. Reminders even remembers which lists you had open if you quit and relaunch (and if it doesn’t, deselect the “Close windows when quitting an app” checkbox in System Preferences > General).

Check Today’s Tasks and Notice the Scheduled List

Perhaps the best part of making reminders is telling Siri to alert you at a particular time. “Hey Siri, remind me to test my backups on Friday the 13th at 9 AM.” Such reminders work well if you just want a notification at that time, but for those who like to see what’s coming up, Reminders has a few features for you.

To see what you’ve scheduled for today, choose View > Go to Today—we prefer the Command-T shortcut. To expand your view of tasks to those you didn’t finish yesterday (drat!) and those that are coming soon, click the automatically generated Scheduled list at the top of the sidebar. (It also exists at the top of the list of lists in the iOS version of Reminders.) The Scheduled list shows every reminder that has an associated time—it’s helpful for longer-term planning.

The Scheduled list may become overwhelming if you schedule lots of tasks, so Reminders on the Mac has one more trick for helping you view your tasks by date. Choose View > Show Calendar to display a tiny calendar at the bottom of the sidebar. Any date that has tasks on it gets a dot underneath; click one to see that day’s items.

Set and Sort By Priorities… Or Not

For those who have so many tasks that they need to prioritize them to stay on track, Reminders provides four levels of priority: None, Low, Medium, and High. To set and reset them quickly for a selected to-do, use the keyboard shortcuts:

Command-1 for Low
Command-2 for Medium
Command-3 for High
Command-4 for None

Once you’ve set priorities, choose View > Sort By > Priority to put your most urgent items at the top. Alas, if you have multiple Reminders lists open at once, the Sort By setting applies to all of them. So you might want to switch back and forth between Priority and other sorts, such Due Date, Creation Date, or Title. Or choose Manual and drag the items into the order you like.

Other Shortcuts

If you want to move an item from one list to another, you can drag it. The trick is to click to the left of its circle or the right of its name; clicking on the name will start editing. You can also Command-click to select multiple items or Shift-Click to select a range of items.

Although clicking the i button that appears when you hover over an item lets you set its notifications and priority, it’s easier to double-click the item. Or, you can Control- or right-click to the left of any item to update it too. Even better, select multiple items first, and then Control- or right-click them to modify them all once! And if your goal is to delete unnecessary items rather than marking them as completed, just select them and press the Delete key.

Reminders may not be the most full-featured to-do list app, but with these tricks and its Siri integration, it can be surprisingly powerful.

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Did You Know Apple Hid Huge Reference Books in Your Mac?

Lucy McAdams — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 18:20:52 +0000

You’re probably used to Mac apps using red underlines to mark misspelled words, but did you know that macOS has long included a fully featured Dictionary app as well? It provides quick access to definitions and synonyms in the New Oxford American Dictionary and the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, along with definitions of Apple-specific words like AppleCare and MacTCP. But that’s far from all it can do.

First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. Launch the Dictionary app from your Applications folder and then type a word or phrase into the Search field. As you type, Dictionary starts looking up words that match what you’ve typed so far—you don’t even have to press Return. If more than one word matches what you’ve typed, click the desired word in the sidebar.

Notice the lozenges below the toolbar, representing the references that Dictionary can consult, and no, your eyes aren’t deceiving you—Dictionary can look things up in Wikipedia if your Mac has an Internet connection. In short, Dictionary gives you instant access to a dictionary, a thesaurus, and an encyclopedia containing over 5.4 million articles in English alone! You can click a reference’s lozenge to limit your search, or select All to scan all of them.

If you want to look up words in another language, or even just British English, Dictionary has you covered, with a long list of other reference works. Choose Dictionary > Preferences and select those you’d like to use. You can drag the selected entries into the order you want their lozenges to appear below the toolbar.

Once you’re in a definition, note that you can copy text for use in other apps—always helpful when wading into grammar and usage arguments on the Internet. More generally, you can click any word in Dictionary’s main pane to look it up instantly. If dictionaries had been this much fun in school, we’d have larger vocabularies! Use the Back and Forward arrow buttons to navigate among your recently looked-up words.

As helpful as the Dictionary app is, you probably don’t want to leave it running all the time. Happily, Apple has provided quite a few shortcut methods for looking up words:

Press Command-Space to invoke Spotlight, and enter your search term.
Select a word, and then choose AppName > Services > Look Up in Dictionary to launch Dictionary and search for that word. This trick should work in most apps, but won’t work in all. If the Look Up in Dictionary command doesn’t appear, make sure it’s enabled in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services, in the Searching category.
Last but best, hover over a word or phrase with the mouse pointer and either press Command-Control-D or Control-click the word and choose Look Up “word.” If the app supports it, macOS displays a popover with the definition or Wikipedia article. If you have a trackpad, you can also do a force-click or three-finger tap on the selected word—make sure the “Look up & data detectors” checkbox is selected in System Preferences > Trackpad > Point & Click.

Now that you know how to take full advantage of the reference works that Apple has built into macOS, it’s time to get in touch with your inner logophile (feel free to look that one up).

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Do You Know What Happens When You Tap Space Twice in iOS?

Lucy McAdams — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 16:13:04 +0000

If you’re thinking, “Why yes, I do know that in iOS a double-tap on the Space bar after typing a word inserts a period and then a space,” award yourself a virtual gold star. If you weren’t aware of that super useful trick, well, you are now. Getting to the Period key on a small-screen iPhone or iPod touch keyboard requires switching to the number keyboard and back again, so this shortcut can provide proper punctuation promptly.

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Take Screenshots to Aid Tech Support

Terry McAdams — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 13:30:17 +0000

If you experience something weird on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, it’s essential to get a record of what happened. That way, when you talk to a more experienced friend or tech support rep, you can share exactly what you saw. The best way to do this is to take a screenshot, which makes a picture of the screen showing whatever it is that has gone wrong. On the Mac, press Command-Shift-3 to put a screenshot on your Desktop. On an iPhone or iPad, press the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons simultaneously to take a screenshot and put it in your Photos app. On the Apple Watch, press the digital crown and side button simultaneously; its screenshots also end up in the iPhone’s Photos app. You can share your screenshots via Messages, email, or any other method of transferring a file.

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