The Obvious Mac Keyboard Shortcut That You May Not Be Using

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you a simple but useful keyboard shortcut that even some experts don't know about.

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So if you like keyboard shortcuts here's something a little bit different. A keyboard shortcut that a lot of people overlook. Some people know it's there but forget to use it and it's so useful. 

When you think of keyboard shortcuts you probably think of things like Command C for Copy, Command Q for Quit, or Control Command F to go into full screen mode. But another important keyboard shortcut is to simply click a letter. Doing this will save you a lot of time when searching for something in a list. My first example is the Finder. Here I have my documents folder. There's a long lists of folders and files here. One way to jump right to something is to press the key that corresponds to the first letter. So, for instance, if I want to go to the folder marked Personal here instead of clicking on it with the mouse I can use the P key. It jumps right to it. 

Now let's say I want to go and refine it even more. I want to go to the Pics folder. I can type pi and it will jump right to that folder. After about a second pause I could try another key. So I can type d to go to Docs, t to jump down to Temp, v to jump down to video diary. So if you want to type more than one character to find a specific item you need to type them pretty quickly.

This even works in other modes here in the Finder. So I can to Icon View here and typing d will still take me to the Docs folder and v to my video diary folder. It gets a little confusing because they're not necessarily in alphabetical order here. But pressing the key will act like they are and find the appropriate folder.

Here's another place where you could use this. This is a Songs list in the Music app. I can press a key to jump right down to the first song with that letter in its name. Or I can type multiple letters to jump right down to that song. It comes in really handy when you need to specify a font. Typically we have very long font lists. So I'll click here for a font and if I want to jump right to Verdana I can type v and it will jump right down to the v's.

It even works here in Mail. You could see I've got different subjects here. They're not in alphabetical order certainly. But if I type w it'll jump to the first email with a subject line that starts with w. If I type r it'll go to the first one with the r in its subject. It also works in the Menu Bar. So I could click here to bring up a menu. Then I could press a letter like m to jump to the first menu item that starts with that letter. It even works in Pulldown or Popup menus. So I could go File, Export and when I click on the Format you could see I have multiple items here. But if I use the letter p it will jump right to the first item with that name. then I could hit Return to use it.

Now this works very well with situations where you're already using the keyboard. For instance you may use the keyboard shortcut O to open a file. Then you get a file dialogue and now you can press keys to actually pick the file that you want rather than having to take your hand off the keyboard, go to the trackpad or mouse, and select a file from the list. It's especially useful when the list is huge like I showed with fonts or songs in the Music app.