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Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Gary Rosenzweig: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today’s episode lets learn how to make are own keyboard shortcuts for Mas OS 10 applications.
So Mac OS 10 allows you to go into system preferences and change standard keyboard shortcuts for all sorts of functionality and applications. But, did you know you can also create your own from menu items that didn’t have shortcuts before. Lets take a look. So here we are in system preferences and we are going to go to the keyboard and mouse preferences and in there, there’s four different tabs we’re going to go to the last one which is keyboard shortcuts. And you’ll notice in here that there are all sorts of keyboard shortcuts that you can customize. But, we’re not going to look at those right now. What we’re going to do is look at the additional ones at the bottom. Application keyboard shortcuts. If we look in there we will see that a default we’ve got nothing. But, we can add them by pressing the plus button right here. Now, all we have to do then is pick the application that we want to set a keyboard shortcut for. Type in the exact name of the menu that we want to create a shortcut for, and give it a keyboard shortcut. So, here’s text edit. Now, in text edit in the edit menu under speech is a start speaking menu item. But there’s no keyboard shortcut for it. We can go ahead and create one by switching to the assistance properties where were before. We have text edit selected as the application. We’re going to type in the name of the menu item exactly so it will start speaking. And we’re going to give it a keyboard shortcut lets do command option shift and s. Click add, we will see it added here under application keyboard shortcuts text edit start speaking now if we switch back to text edit and we go to edit menu and speech we will see that it’s there as a shortcut and sure enough we can go and use it and it will work.
Computer: Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Gary: Now this works for any application. Go ahead and go through the entire list it includes Macintosh application as well as third party ones.So you can choose just about anything you want and add the menu item. Now one big catch here is that you can only choose a unique name as a menu item so when sometime when multiple menu items have the same name for instance in mail you can move to a folder and copy to a folder and if you tried to assign a keyboard shortcut to the name of that folder it will appear in a copy to sub menu not the move to one. So you really can’t use it for anything and you also can’t use it for the name of windows and certain other things like that and that is can’t conflict with over shortcuts either. You can even use it to add keyboard shortcuts to the finder all you need to do is press the plus button again choose as your app finder dot app and then type the menu item like show clipboard which doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut and I am going to assign shift option command c add it now if I shift to the finder I will see that show clipboard as that keyboard shortcut I’ll go ahead and execute it on the keyboard and there is the clipboard
So next you are in one of you next applications and you try to use a menu item that doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut consider adding one using system preferences and this will speed things up every time you need to use that menu item Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.