The Super-Powerful Mac Keyboard Shortcut That Most People Don't Use

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at a super-powerful Mac keyboard shortcut that most users don't even know about.

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So here's a keyboard shortcut that I think ranks right up there with Command Space to bring up the Spotlight menu or Command Tab to switch apps. It's the command to bring up the Help Menu in the Menu Bar. But why would that be super-powerful? How often do you actually need to look at Help documentation on your Mac. Well, this command does much more than bring up documentation. Let's take a look at it. 

In order to trigger it use the Command key and then Shift and then Slash. It's easy to remember because it's basically Command Question mark. Shift and slash are question mark. So I just remember Command question mark. Now you could see it brings up the Help Menu. It's the only keyboard shortcut that brings up a function in the Menu Bar like this. Now you can type something. So, for instance, let's type Rename. Now you may look at it and say, well great. There's all the Help topics. So I can read about how to rename files on my Mac. 

But that's not the real power here. Forget about that stuff. Instead look at the first item there. Menu Items and there's the Rename menu item. Let's arrow down to that and you could see, with that selected, it shows me that the Rename command is in the File Menu. The first thing this does is that it helps you find Command in the Menu. So here I am in Pages and I can do the same thing here. The keyboard shortcut brings up the Help Menu. Now I can search for any menu item. So I can just start typing and you could see how it narrows it down with each character. Then I could see the menu item that I want. I could arrow down to it.

Now in addition to showing me where it is I can now just hit Return and it activates it. So I don't actually have to use the advise given here that it's under Format, Font. I can just hit Return and it will issue that command. So it does a bunch of different things from here. First it allows me to use just the keyboard to bring up a menu command. Second, it allows me to see where that command actually is so I can learn it. Also by doing that I could see that there's a direct keyboard shortcut for that.

But that's not all. I can also use this to navigate the entire Menu Bar. So I could issue the command and then I could use the left and right arrows to go between all the menu items. As a matter of fact it even loops around. If I go to the right here it goes back to the Apple menu. Then when I get to a menu I can use the down arrow to go down. I can use the right arrow to go into a submenu and I can select what I want and then hit Return or Space and it will issue that command. 

Now there's another keyboard shortcut for getting into the Menu Bar. You can see the in System Preferences Keyboard Shortcuts under Keyboard here there's Move Focus to the Menu Bar. Usually Control F2 if you have it turned on. But it doesn't always work. It has always been a bit buggy and sometimes it doesn't actually bring you to the Menu Bar. Whereas Shift Command Slash always brings you up to the Help Menu and then allows you to access the rest of the Menu Bar easily with the arrow keys.

Now, of course, it's always going to be easiest to use the exact keyboard shortcut for the command you need. But in a complex app, like say Numbers, you can't possibly remember all of the keyboard shortcuts. So sometimes it's easier to do Command Space Slash. Then start typing to find what you want and select that. Then you can do what you want using just the keyboard without having to resort to moving your cursor up here, searching through the menus to find what you want. 

So Command Shift Slash does three things for you. It allows you to find Menu items. You can then issue the Command for that menu item right there in the Help Menu and you can use the arrow keys to navigate the entire Menu Bar. This makes it your go-to keyboard shortcut for doing anything, especially if you can't remember a specific keyboard shortcut for that exact command. Just do Command Shift Slash, type a couple characters, arrow down, hit Return or Space and you've done it without having to resort to using the mouse or trackpad to search around for that menu item.