50 Mac Safari Shortcuts

Here are 50 shortcuts that will make it quicker and easier to navigate around web pages and tabs. Learn how to use your keyboard to move around on a page, find information, and jump to different pages and tabs. Also find out about ways to click on links with modifier keys to open them in different ways and how to drag tabs and downloads.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's speedup your web browsing with 50 time saving Safari shortcuts.
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So there are so many different keyboard and cursor shortcuts for Safari. Let's focus on some that will make it faster to navigate around webpages and tabs. So let's start by looking at the largest key on your keyboard. The Spacebar. If you hit the spacebar while viewing a webpage, and you're not editing text in some field like the search field here, you will advance to the next page. So you can see hitting the spacebar over and over again will advance page by page so you can read the text there. If you hold the Shift key down and press spacebar it goes in the opposite direction. One page up so you get back to the top.
If you want to advance in smaller increments you can use the down arrow. The Down arrow will advance by about a line. The Up arrow will go up a line. If you hold the Option key down and press the down or up arrow you get pages. So it is the same as the spacebar or shift spacebar to use Option down or Option up. If you use the Command key and down it goes all the way to the bottom of the webpage. Command up will go all the to the top.
What about the left and right arrow keys. By themselves they don't do anything. But if you do Command left it's the same as hitting the Back button here. If you do Command right it's the same as hitting the forward button. If you look under the History menu you'll see that the back and forward buttons actually have shortcuts that are Command left bracket and right bracket. Those do the same thing. Command left bracket and Command right bracket are back and forward just the same as Command left and Command right.
Now if I use Command Shift and the right arrow it actually goes through the tabs. So notice I've got four tabs now open at the top. If I do Command Shift right arrow it goes to the next tab, the next tab, the next tab, and it will circle back to the first one. If I use the left arrow, so Command Shift left arrow, it just goes through them backwards. If you look in the window menu you notice that Show Next Tab is actually Control tab and Previous tab is Control Shift tab. So those do the same thing. If I do Control tab it goes to the next one and it circles through. If I do Control Shift tab it goes backwards through them.
Now you can jump to a tab by doing Command and then a number key. So Command and 3 jumps to the third tab. Command 1 will jump to the first tab. You can do that all the way up to Command 8. Command 9 will actually jump to the ninth tab if you have nine tabs open but will also jump to the last tab in any case. So if you have 13 tabs open Command 9 will jump to the thirteenth tab. If you have 4 tabs open, like I have here, Command 9 will jump to the fourth tab. Now to create a new tab there's a really handy keyboard shortcut, Command t. Command t creates a new tab and allows you to enter a URL to go to. If you want to get to the URL field on any page, like a page that you're already at, you can just do Command L and it instantly gives you access to the field here or you can start a search or type a new URL.
Now a lot of people don't know that you can move tabs around. So if you wanted this third tab here to actually be second you can click and drag the tab to the left and move it around. These are all rearrangeable. Now when you click a link it will go to the webpage in the current tab. But you can hold down some modifier keys to do some different things. They're going to work differently for different people because of some settings. So go into Safari, Preferences and click on Tabs. You'll see a list here of four different modifiers. For instance I've got it set so Command click opens a link in a new tab. Now, these four things will change depending upon these two checkmarks. So, for instance, if I have both of them unchecked you'll see that Command click will open a link in a new window. If I select this it will open a link in a new tab. If I select this it will open a link in a new tab and make it the active tab. If I unselect the first checkmark here it'll  opens a link in a new window and makes it the active window. So you can see there are four variations depending upon how I have each of these checked.
The Command Shift click is another thing that will change with these different check boxes here. Command Option click and Command Option Shift click. So you have four different ways to modify how a click works and you can change them by using these check boxes here. So it's all a matter of whether you prefer windows or tabs and whether or not when you click something you want to jump to that window or tab or just have that open up in the background.
Now to close a tab you can use Command w which is the standard keyboard shortcut for closing a window or tab. So Command w will close this tab. Now if you accidentally do that you can use Undo to get is back because if you look at Edit, Undo you can see it changes to Undo Close tab, Command z, since that was the last thing I did. So Command z will bring that tab back. The same thing happens for windows. So I can use Command N for a new window. Now I have a new browser window. If I go to a page there I can close it with Command w. 
Now if you prefer using windows instead of tabs you can always open a new window with Command N. Now you can see I have two browser windows and I can go to a page here. I can open up tabs in this window and I can close this window here, since there's only one tab. Command w will close the tab meaning the entire window is gone. 
The standard way to switch between windows in Mac apps is to use Command and the key to the left of the one key on US keyboards. So command and that key will switch between windows just like you were switching between tabs. If I had even more windows open I can switch between all of these windows, cycle through them, with Command and that key to the left of the one. Using Shift will go the opposite way through them. Now while you can use Undo to bring back a tab you just closed, Undo won't work for a closed window. However under History you've got Shift Command t to reopen the last closed window. 
Now there are a few shortcuts that will take you directly to a webpage without you having to set anything up. If you look under Bookmarks and then you go to Favorites you'll see that the first nine favorites listed here have keyboard shortcuts assigned. In this case Option Command 1, Option Command 2, all the way to Option Command 9. But do note that if under Preferences in Tabs if you uncheck this, so you're not using Command 1 through Command 9 to switch between tabs, then under Bookmarks the option goes away. It's simply Command 1 though Command 9 that will be used to go to those. So if you really want to control what these are you can go into Edit, Bookmarks and under Favorites here you can change the order of these, move them around, change what they go to so you can get those nine keyboard shortcuts matched up to websites that you commonly go to.
Now if you have an absolute favorite page that you go to all the time you can go to Safari, Preferences and under General you can setup that page as your Home page. Then you've got the keyboard shortcut for Home, which is Shift Command H, to quickly go to that page. If you want to go back in time you can go to your History and you've got these buttons here. A handy thing to be able to do is click one to go back one page. But if you click and hold it'll actually show you a list of the complete history of that tab that you have selected. The same is true of the forward button. Now if you hold down the Option key and click these then instead of getting the page titles you get the actual URLs of the pages.
You can also go look at all of your history. You can do that with the keyboard shortcut Command y. Now once you're on a webpage sometimes the page is so large that it's hard to find the piece of information you want in it. You can search inside of a webpage by using Command f. This opens up a little search box here and you can immediately type into it. As you type you get results. So it will jump to the first result. I'm looking for Einstein here but I only had to type three letters. It tells me there are three matches. It gives me little buttons to go back and forth between those matches and a Done button to dismiss. You can see it highlights the word where it finds it. The menu items for this are under Edit, Find. So you can see here there's Command f. There's also Command g to find next and Shift Command g to find the previous one. 
Now to make a webpage easier to view you can use Command and plus. It's actually Command and equals to enlarge the page. So you see the text gets a lot bigger. Command and minus make it smaller again. Command zero will actually take it to its real regular size. You can also do Shift Command r to go into reader view for a page. Then the same Shift Command r will take you out of reader view.
If you ever need more space for entering in text, like in a form like this, notice that some text fields you'll see these two little lines at the bottom right hand corner. This means you can drag to resize the box. Now when you download something you'll get a little download icon here. I'll click here to download this PDF. You can see I get downloads here. I can click on it and see the downloads. I can click the little magnifying glass here to jump right to it which is in the downloads folder. But I can also click and drag the icon right in here and I can drag it to a finder window to move it out of the downloads folder to the place I wanted.
Now if you ever want to reload a page, which is particularly useful if you're following breaking news and pages are changing all the time, then you can use View and Reload Page or Command r to reload it. But if you hold the Option key down, so Command Option r, it reloads the page from the origin meaning that instead of taking graphics and other elements from your browser cache, it will reload all of those so it's a complete page reload.
I'm going to finish with another way to handle tabs which is to use Command and Shift and then the backslash. That brings up the tab overview and you can see all the tabs open in the current window. One of the cool things about this page is once you're here you can do Command f and now you get Search Tabs and you can use it to search but only the title of the tab. So, for instance, if I were to look for Einstein it wouldn't find it because it's not in the title of this page but in the content. If I searched for Apple it will find both of these tabs because the word Apple appears in the title for both tabs.
Now one last one for you. If you search using the search field at the top of Safari and then you view the search results in the search engine of your choice you can go to a page and then you can get back to the search results using search result snapback. So Option Command s takes you back to your search results. So if you're doing a complex search and keep looking at webpages and not finding the information you need you can use the shortcut to jump back to the search results.

Comments: 7 Responses to “50 Mac Safari Shortcuts”

Bob

6 years ago

Wow!, Gary, this tutorial is wonderful!! I wish it was something that I could print out instead of having to remember or review this tutorial over and over. Thank you for this and every tutorial you prepare and share.
Bob Riley
Milton, MA 02186

Robert Douglass

I agree with Bob Riley! This is quite a fact-loaded tutorial that needs a printed 'cheat-sheet'.
I also thank Gary for all he has shared over the years.
It's amazing to me that, having used Safari for as long as it has existed, I never realized that that little 'download icon' gave me the ability to directly drag&drop a newly downloaded file to a different location... sigh.

Rich

5 years ago

Easy to print shortcuts. Drag on bottom right of Gary's post to enlarge it to full size where you can read entire post without scrolling. Then, copy and paste to Text File and print.

Eric

"The standard way to switch between windows in Mac apps is to use Command and the key to the left of the one key on US keyboards."

On a wireless Apple UK magic keyboard it is the key to the left of "z".

Theodore Bourne

need to have print out. Can't remember them all

Chuck

Thanks Gary! One item I really like that I don't think was mentioned was the ability to "pin" a tab for a frequently visited website. I have 3 of these pinned on every safari page, and use them constantly. Here's Apple's instructions: "drag the tab with the website you want to pin to the left side of the tab bar. When the tab shrinks and displays the website's icon or initial, drop it in place. You can also choose Window > Pin Tab, or Control-click a tab, then , then choose Pin Tab"

Gillie

I highlighted it, copy and paste in Pages. Then I separated its topics into paragraphs than print.

Comments Closed.

50 Mac Safari Shortcuts

Comments: 7 Responses to “50 Mac Safari Shortcuts”

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