6 Keyboard Shortcuts You Can Use In Mac Open And Save Dialogs

When you save or open a file in an app on the Mac, you get a dialog box with several buttons. You can use keyboard shortcuts inside that dialog to cancel, perform the default action, and do other things. You can choose a location using the keyboard, either with a single shortcut or by specifying a path. You can also navigate to any of the buttons using the tab key and spacebar.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at keyboard shortcuts for Save and Open Dialogues.
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So most keyboard shortcuts deal with commands in the Menu Bar. But when you go to Save or Open a file you're presented with a special dialogue and you can use some keyboard shortcuts there too to get through that quicker.
Here I've created a document in Pages and have typed some text but I haven't saved it yet.  So I'm going to do Command S or you could do File, Save and be presented with a Save dialogue. Now the Save dialogue has two modes. This is the compressed mode where you see just the bare minimum and you can click this little reveal triangle here to look at the full mode. It doesn't matter which one of these we use because the keyboard shortcuts are pretty much the same. 
The first one I'm going to show you is how to Cancel if you don't want to do whatever the action is or the Dialogue like Open or Save or it could be something else like Printing. You can use the Cancel button. But the keyboard shortcut for that is either the Escape key or you can use Command period to trigger the cancel button. Now if you want to actually save then you can, of course, click the Save button. But if you want to do it by the keyboard you can just hit the Return key. The Return key, by default, is going to do the default action. In this case the button that it's in the bright blue color. Now notice text is selected in the Save As field for typing. So I can type a name and then hit Return to save all without having to touch the mouse or trackpad.
Now there's a variation on the Save dialogue. That's when you go to close something you haven't saved yet. So for instance I can go to File, Close or use Command W and I get Save and Cancel as before except now I also get a Delete button. Now on some apps that button says Don't Save. When it says Don't Save you can use Command D to activate Don't Save. But you can also use Command Delete and do it. When it's the Delete button is seems like only Command Delete works. So if I want to Close this document and never save it I can use Command and press the Delete key on the keyboard and it's the same as pressing that Delete button on the screen.
You can navigate around to different folders in the Save dialogue using the same keyboard shortcuts you used in the Finder. So see here where it says Desktop. I can do Command Shift O and it changes to Documents. Where did Command Shift O come from? Well if I go to the Finder here there's a Go command and you can see all these keyboard shortcuts. Command Shift O for Documents. Command Shift D for Desktop. L for Downloads and H for Home. C for Computer, etc. So I can get to any of these folders the same way. So for instance if I wanted to get to the Home folder it's Command Shift H. I go back into Pages here and Command Shift H takes me to my Home folder.
This also works in Open Dialogue. So if I wanted to go File, Open I can do Command Shift H to go Home. Command Shift O to go to Documents. Note that you can also use Command up arrow to move up in the hierarchy. So say I moved up from the iCloud Drive Documents folder to iCloud Drive. If I were to go say to the Home folder and go down into Pictures I could do Command Up to go up. It works the same in Save dialogues. There I am in my Home folder. I can do Command Shift O for Documents. Command up arrow to go up one level.
Now other Finder keyboard shortcuts work as well. Here I am in an Open dialogue and you see I can actually switch to Icon or Column view instead of List view here. In the Finder, View Icon List in Columns corresponds to Command 1, Command 2, and Command 3. So I can go back into Pages here and do Command 1, Command 2, and Command 3 and you can see those work as well. Lots of other Finder shortcuts work here as well.
Now if you really like using the keyboard you can actually type the name of the path. All you need to do is use one of two keys. Either the Slash key. Type that and notice instead of entering it in the name field there it automatically uses this Go to the folder field here and you can start typing a path name starting with the top level of your drive which you would normally start with a slash. Now instead of that I can do the tilde which on American keyboards is Shift and then the key just to the left of the one. Then I get a little tilde there. Then I can start typing a path that's relative to my Home folder. So I would do a slash after that and then start typing something. Like say the Documents folder. 
Now I can use Auto Complete as well by pressing Tab and it will try to Autocomplete in a similar way to how the Terminal does it. So, for instance, if I try to do D and then Autocomplete it would give me a selection of stuff because there are several different folders that start with D. But if I did D o c and then hit Tab it would automatically go to Documents because it's the only thing that could match that. So you could quickly type path names here and then hit Go and it changes the Where to be that location.
So what about other buttons. If I were to do Command S for Save and it's an expanded dialogue here, for instance,  I have a New Folder button. How do I get to that? Or what if I go to a Dialogue that has a lot of stuff in it. Like I'll do Command P for Print and there are a bunch of buttons in here. I can Tab between elements. Now notice what's going to happen. I'm going to Tab and it's only going to go to fields I can type in. Right now I'm in the number of Copies. I Tab and it's From and Tab again and it goes to To and it just goes between those. 
However in System Preferences you can change this. Go to Keyboard and then Shortcuts. Then there's a selection here for Full Keyboard Access. Turn that to All controls. Notice that Control F7 allows you to toggle this. So now that it's All controls when I Tab it goes to everything. Every little button in this dialogue. So if I wanted to do something like for instance use the High Details button I can get to that button and then hit the spacebar to activate it. Same thing if I did Command S. If I wanted to get to a New Folder now I can Tab to it and notice that it goes to every element. Eventually I get to New Folder, you see that it's highlighted, and I can use the spacebar. Now I can create a New Folder. In this dialogue, by the way, I can also use Command period or Escape to cancel. So using that you could do just about anything in a dialogue without ever having to lift your fingers off the keyboard.

Comments: 2 Responses to “6 Keyboard Shortcuts You Can Use In Mac Open And Save Dialogs”

Laraine

5 years ago

Shortcuts are great, Gary, and absolutely necessary if you use your Mac in your job. I'm astonished at the number of people who never bother with them: always go to the menu to print a document for instance. Many people don't even know the basic shortcuts of command-c and command-v (or control if you use a Wndows machine).

John Stires

There are some great keyboard shortcuts options in the System Preferences, Keyboard, Text columns. I use typing an "l" (el) three times for my home email address. jjj creates "John", jss types out my full name and so on. There are few limitations and for anyone with twenty-nine characters in heir name or email address, it's a winner.

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6 Keyboard Shortcuts You Can Use In Mac Open And Save Dialogs

Comments: 2 Responses to “6 Keyboard Shortcuts You Can Use In Mac Open And Save Dialogs”

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