Keyboard shortcuts - homemade
We had a bunch of posts on keyboard shortcuts (part 1, part 2 and throughout a lot of other posts). Today, we will explore another great feature of Mac OS X - creating your own keyboard shortcuts.
As always with keyboard shortcuts tutorials: Take a look at this, if you are not sure where the modifier keys (e.g. shift, option, command) are located.
Previously, we looked at the Safari extension SafariStand and its Sidebar to display thumbnails of all open tabs in Safari.
You may have noticed that the menu entry for Toggle Sidebar does not have a shortcut. If you use this command a lot a keyboard shortcut will be very handy.
For this tutorial let’s use control-S, because command-S is the standard shortcut for Save in almost any application (also in Safari).
Note: However, you could override this standard shortcut (or any other pre-defined shortcut of any application) with the following tutorial, as well. Very handy to adjust any application to your needs.
If you are not sure, if a keyboard shortcut is used by an application, just open the application and press the desired keyboard shortcut. If nothing happens, you are good to go.
Identify the menu item
In Mac OS X you can define a keyboard shortcut for every command in the menu bar. The only thing you need is its exact name. So let’s look at the SafariStand menu:
We see, that Toggle Sidebar does not have a shortcut listed on the right side (as the F5 key for Stand Bar, for example).
Adding custom keyboard shortcuts works via the menu item. So we need to remember Toggle Sidebar (including capitalization).
Adding keyboard shortcuts
1) Open up System Preferences via the Apple menu or the Dock.
2) Go to the Keyboard and Mouse preference pane.
3) Click the tab Keyboard shortcuts
4) Click the plus icon in the lower right corner, below the list
5) A window to add a shortcut pops up.
6) Instead of All Applications, pick Safari from that list.
7) In the field Menu title enter what we remember before - Toggle Sidebar. As said, this must be the exact title of the menu item.
8) Finally click the field for Keyboard shortcut, so the cursor is blinking inside and press the desired keyboard shortcut. It will instantly show up in that field.
9) To add the shortcut, click Add.
10) Now switch back to Safari and check if it worked out as you wished.
11) Looking at the menu for SafariStand we see the menu item Toggle Sidebar now has a shortcut, too.
Done. Enjoy your new found freedom for shortcuts.
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Tags: customization, keyboard, SafariStand
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