25 Useful Safari Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

Learn some keyboard shortcuts to speed up your Safari browsing experience.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at some keyboard shortcuts for Safari. 
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When browsing in Safari it is handy to know some keyboard shortcuts to quickly get to the content that you want. For instance, when you're viewing a page and you want to go to a new one you would normally go to the top where you see the Address Bar, click there, and then you could type in a new address or a search term. But there is a keyboard shortcut for that as well. You could just press Command L and not only does it move the text cursor to the Address Bar, but it selects everything. So if you start typing right now then it will replace it with whatever new address or search term you want.
When you browse and you go from one page to another and then perhaps to another then you want to go back you can click the Back Button here at the top left. But a quick keyboard shortcut for that is the Command Key and then the left square bracket key. Use that to go back and you can use Command and the right square bracket key to go forward. 
Now to close a Tab you could click the little button here to the left of the name of the Tab or you can use the keyboard shortcut, Command W. If you accidentally close a Tab or change your mind afterwards you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command and T to reopen the previous Tab. But you could also use Command Z to do that. Notice if I use Command W to close this Tab then go to Edit then Command Z, Undo, changes to Undo Closed Tab. So I can use Command Z for the same thing. 
To get to various Tabs you can just use Command and the number. So Command 1 will take you to the first Tab. Command 2 will take you to the second Tab and so on. All the way up to Command 8. Command 9 will work to take you to the last Tab no matter how many Tabs there are. Now if you just want to cycle through the Tabs you can use the Control Key, that's Control not Command. Then the Tab Key on your keyboard and that will cycle through and loop through all of the Tabs. Add the Shift Key to that and it goes backwards. 
Now when you have a long page like this you can use the Up and Down arrow keys to scroll approximately one line at a time. But, if you want to jump faster you can use the Page Up and Page Down keys to jump one page at a time. Now if you Mac doesn't have Page Up and Page Down keys, which is very likely as no MacBooks have that, then you can substitute the fn key on your keyboard and Down and Up as Page Down and Page Up. Now you can also scroll to the end of a page using the End Key on your keyboard or the Home Key on your keyboard. Of course if you don't have those keys then there is a substitution. You can use the fn key and then the right key for End and the left key for Home. Now Safari also allows you to use the Command Key and then the Down Arrow or Up Arrow for End and Home. 
Now, often when you're viewing a large page, like an article, you may want to find information on the page itself. So you want to search the page. You don't want to search the internet for a new page, you want to search for the text on the current page. You can do this using the keyboard shortcut Command F. This will open up a new small toolbar which mostly has things to the right. You can search here. Notice the text cursor is already there blinking so you can just start typing something to search. But you can also switch between Contains and Begins With. Let's search here for a word like that. You can see there's 74 matches here. So it automatically jumps to the first one. If I were to continue to press Return it jumps to each one in turn. But you can also use Command G to go to the next one. Shift Command G will go to the previous one. So you can search through the page for every occurrence of that search term. While the special toolbar is open you can do Shift Command F to close it. 
Now sometimes you may want to read articles in a nicer format. You can do that with the Reader View. It's under View and then Show Reader. The keyboard shortcut is Shift Command R. That will take you into Reader View and you can use Shift Command R to get out of it as well. Now whether or not you're in Reader View you can always increase the size of elements on the page with Command and then either the Plus or Minus keys. So you can see it increases the size of everything or decreases the size of everything. If you ever want to get back to the normal size just use Command Zero. 
Now you can also leave the images the same size and just change the text. To do that add Option to this. So Command Option and then Plus and you can see the images stay the same size but the text changes. Then just use Command Zero to change everything back to its normal size. 
So when you search for something and use the Address Bar to do it then you'll get search results in your default search engine. You can then go to a page and maybe continue to jump to other pages as well. If you ever want to get back to the search results you could use the back key multiple times or Command and then left square bracket multiple times to get there. But you could also go and use Search Results SnapBacker or Option Command S and that will take you right back to the search results page no matter how far away you got from it.
Now if you look in your Bookmarks you're always going to have a Favorites Folder. The first nine items in the Favorites Folder will have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them. They have to be regular items, not folders. So you can see with the first four items here and its Option Command 1, 2, 3, 4 to take me to each of those. So it is easy to get to those pages. As a matter of fact make those first nine favorites pages you commonly go to and then you automatically have keyboard shortcuts to take you there. 
In addition you could also use Command Shift and then H to go to your Home Page. You setup your Safari Home Page by going to Safari, Settings, and then under General look for Home Page. You could put any URL for any page you want there and then the keyboard shortcut, Shift, Command H will take you to that page. 
Finally, if you do want to look at your Bookmarks there are so many different ways to do it. You can go to Bookmarks Menu and look at all the submenus there. You could go to View and then Show Bookmarks Sidebar and then it is there. Same thing if you go to Bookmarks, Show Bookmarks it brings that up. But the problem with all of those is you can only jump to Bookmarks. You can't Edit them or manage them in any way. If you go to Bookmarks and then Edit Bookmarks, then you not only get a way to Edit and Arrange your Bookmarks, but you could also jump to anyone you want. Just double-click one and it takes you there. So it is kind of the ultimate view of your Bookmarks and the keyboard shortcut to get there is simply Option Command B. So if you like working with Bookmarks just use Option Command B for everything whether you want to jump to a Bookmark or Edit a Bookmark, Delete it, Rearrange them, whatever. 
I hope you found all these keyboard shortcuts useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “25 Useful Safari Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know”

brad

1 year ago

I'm curious if you know a reason why SEARCH RESULTS SNAPBACK is never available to me. I tried reversing the option in Safari/Prefs/er uh Settings/General:
I use Tab Layout: Separate, I always show website titles in tabs and I open pages in tabs instead of windows automatically.
Changing that made no difference but I can't think of what else I could have messed up, er uh, changed to make this command unavailable. Not a critical issue--just curious.

Gary Rosenzweig

brad: Make sure you use the address field to search, not a web page (like Google's home page). Don't skip the search results page as you must end up at a search results page for this to work. If you choose one of the results from the drop-down then you go right to the result.

Thanks!
I’m using the "Address and Search" field of the toolbar.
I open a new blank window, search a term there, open a resulting link, then a link within that page and a link within that page and SEARCH RESULTS SNAPBACK always remains grayed out. I find my ways...

brad: Don't open the "resulting link." Type your search term and then press Return to go to the search page. Unless you see Google's search page with the results first, and then select a result on that page, it won't work. There's nothing to "snap back" to if you don't visit the search results page.

on a blank page, in the "Address and Search" field, I enter the term. The result is Google’s page with all the results. I choose one of those links and then burrow down into deeper and deeper links but never does SEARCH RESULTS SNAPBACK become available.
UNTIL: I started to record my keystrokes & mac’s reactions so I could show you and after the first subsequent link, the SEARCH RESULTS SNAPBACK became available just like it’s supposed to!

It’s as if starting the record/capture process changed something because after shutting down the recording, it still works like a charm. I’m guessing nothing happened like I said and this was all a hallucination. I hope you didn’t get too consternated! After all this, I’m going to make damn sure I find a reason to use it! LOL!

Comments Closed.

25 Useful Safari Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

Comments: 6 Responses to “25 Useful Safari Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know”

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