Creating Keyboard Shortcuts To Launch Apps

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create keyboard shortcuts to launch apps on your Mac. 

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I'm often asked if there is a way to launch an app using a keyboard shortcut. You can do that if you use the Shortcuts App. Now the Shortcuts App is a way to create these simple little actions, kind of like scripts. It's not related to keyboard shortcuts. But you can assign a keyboard shortcut to a Shortcut so you can trigger it with the keyboard. So we're going to create a simple shortcut that will launch an app and then assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

Let's go to the Shortcuts App here and then let's create a shortcut that will launch an app, say Pages. I'm going to click the New Shortcut button right there at the top of the screen and then I'm going to search for an Action to add to this shortcut. The Action I want is Open App. Open App is probably the simplest action there is. It simply launches an app, or if it is already launched it brings it to the front. I'm going to double click on it and then I'm going to click the one parameter that is needed the app to launch. I'm going to click that and search for Pages. Then I'll double click that to put that as the parameter. 

So now we will open Pages. We can test this out with the Run button at the top of the screen. By Run you can see will run pages and this is the document I was working on. Let's name it. Launch Pages and close it out. You can see I can also run it by clicking the Run button here in the Shortcuts App. But that's not very useful. We don't want to launch Shortcuts just to launch other apps. Instead let's assign a keyboard shortcut that will do this even when the Shortcuts App isn't running. 

So I'm going to double click here to go back into the shortcut. I'm going to click on the Details button here at the upper right and I'm going to click the Add Keyboard Shortcut button here. This will automatically check the use as Quick Action and Put in Services Menu checkboxes here. Those are required in order for there to be a keyboard shortcut. Now it is difficult to find good keyboard shortcuts set that you can use to launch a variety of apps. But I found that Control and Option, so Control not command, and then a number would work really well. So I'll do Control Option 1 to launch Pages here. Now this is setup automatically to receive any input from Quick Action. That happened when that checkbox got activated there. We don't need to receive any input at all. So I'm going to click there and Deselect All so now it's received no input from Quick Actions. Just to be a little neater. 

Now let's close this and let's check in the Services Menu. Here I can see under Services there's launch Pages and there's the Keyboard Shortcut. But let's quit Shortcuts altogether and we find in any app in the Services Menu, like here in Finder we'll see Launch Pages and the keyboard shortcut. So let's try it. Control Option 1. We can see there it launched Pages. So back here at the Shortcuts App let's duplicate this. I'm going two-finger click on the trackpad or right click on the mouse to bring up the Context Menu, Duplicate. For this duplicate item here we'll go in. We'll change it to Launch, instead of Pages, we'll say Numbers. We'll change this from Pages to Numbers as well. Then we're going to go to the Details section here and add a keyboard shortcut for that. So Control Option 2 for Numbers. Let's do it again for Keynote. Duplicate, go in, change the name, change which app it opens, and then change the keyboard shortcut to Control Option 3. 

Notice by duplicating it kept the same color. We could have started with a different color and we can certainly change to one now. But it also takes the icon automatically of the app we've chosen. It's smart enough to realize the only thing it is doing is opening an app and maybe the icon should be the icon for that app. So it's easy to see what we've got going on here. In addition we can go and create a new Folder here. Let's call the Folder, Launch Apps, and then let's go here and take these three and move them here. So now we can easily see these 3 here and kind of keep them separate from the rest.

We Quit Shortcuts. Now when we look in the Services Menu we're going to see all of these here listed alphabetically. So not necessarily in the order of the keyboard shortcuts or the order we created them. We can use them to launch an app. So Control Option 3 and it will launch Keynote. 

You can also go to System Settings and then Keyboard and then Keyboard Shortcuts and then go to Services. Under Services there's a section for Shortcuts. Expand that and you'll find these here. You can change the Keyboard Shortcuts for all of them right here instead of having to go back into each individual shortcut. It's also a handy place to see all of the shortcuts and make sure they are set correctly. 

A better set of keyboard shortcuts used for this may be the F keys. If you go to Function Keys right here and you turn this On then a key like F1 is actually F1. If you have this turned Off then F1 is actually Lower Screen Brightness, the symbol on top of F1. You have to use the fn key to hit a true F1. But if this is On we could actually go and change these to be F keys. So, for instance, I could go in here and change this to F1, change this to F2, and change this to F3. Now I can launch these apps by hitting just those keys on the keyboard. No modifiers necessary. So now you can go through and add as many of these as you want. Maybe even have some modifiers. I'll have this one for F1. Maybe launching something else. There's Command F1, or Option F1. You can have keyboard shortcuts for basically any app that you need. 

Remember this works not just to launch an app but to bring it to the front as well. So here I've got Pages. Let's say I go to another app like Safari. If I want to bring Pages back, sure I can use the App Switcher and Go To Pages and select it like that. But I can also just use F1 again and that will bring it to the front. So in this case F1 becomes my single key, all purpose, show me Pages right now keyboard shortcut. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.