How To Disable a Keyboard Shortcut On a Mac

If you want to disable a keyboard shortcut to avoid accidentally triggering that action, there are a variety of ways to do it.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to disable a keyboard shortcut on your Mac. 
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Now I'm often asked about how to setup a custom keyboard shortcut. A shortcut for a menu item that doesn't normally have one. Sometimes though I'm asked how to disable a keyboard shortcut. So a shortcut that already exists but maybe you're accidentally triggering it because it is also used by another app in a different way or your fingers accidentally hit those keys. You can actually disable keyboard shortcuts as well. 
Now first there are two types of keyboard shortcuts. Ones that are systemwide keyboard shortcuts and ones that are specific to an app. For systemwide keyboard shortcuts it is actually kind of easy to disable them. So go to System Preferences and then Keyboard and then Shortcuts. Here you're going to see all these different lists of systemwide keyboard shortcuts. Look! There's checkboxes next to them. Easy. All you need to do to disable them, like for instance Show Desktop F11, is just uncheck that box. Now this keyboard shortcut won't work any longer. 
So if the keyboard shortcut you want is here then it's easy to disable by using the checkboxes. 
So what happens if it's a keyboard shortcut that is from a Menu in an App. All of these ones that you see here. Well, you can disable those as well but it is not as straight forward. For instance, here in Pages let's say sometimes you're accidentally triggering Format Font, Show Fonts with Command T. After all Command T is really easy to hit and it used for other things like a new tab in Safari. What if we just wanted to disable that? Or maybe disable Command Q for Quit. Well, the first thing you need to do is to know the exact Menu item. In this case it is Show Fonts. You're going to need to type this exactly just like if you were creating a custom keyboard shortcut. But here we don't need to create a custom keyboard shortcut. There's already a shortcut for it. We need to get rid of this one. We can do that in a few different ways. 
Now the most obvious way may seem to be to assign a new keyboard shortcut to it and this works. In System Preferences in this same location go to App Shortcuts. Add a new app shortcut by clicking the Plus button. Set the application to the app that you want, in this case Pages, and for the Menu title type it exactly. Now just assign a new keyboard shortcut. You could make it something a little bit different than what is already there like Shift Control Command T instead of Command T. So you still have access to the Menu item through a shortcut but it is not easy to trigger. Or you go with something really obscure that you would never use just to get it out of the way. Like Shift Control Option Command F12 and add that. Now if you look here you'll see that's the keyboard shortcut. Command T no longer does anything in Pages. So effectively you have disabled it by assigning it to something very obscure. 
But there's another way to do it as well. That is to assign the same keyboard shortcut to something that you would never use. To do this what you need to do is find a menu command that is not usually activated. What I mean is it is grayed out. See how different things are grayed out here and you can't actually use them. Like look here under Format, Table, and then Unmerge Cells. The only reason that would be an active menu item is if you're actually in a Table and you've merged two cells and now you've selected them and want to unmerge them. Otherwise this is going to be gray and unusable whether it's by the keyboard shortcut or through the menu item. So let's use Unmerge Cells for this example. You could use anything that you regularly see as being gray because the correct item is never selected for the type of work you do. 
So let me get rid of this here and instead I'm going to add for Pages, Unmerge Cells. I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Command T. That is the keyboard shortcut that we want to get rid of for Show Fonts. Let me add it. Now if I go to Format and then Table I could see that Unmerged Cells is now Command T. If I go to Format, Font, Show Fonts there's nothing because I've used that keyboard shortcut somewhere else and my custom shortcut will take precedent over the one that is part of the app. So you could do the same thing for Quit. If I go to System Preferences and let's make Unmerge Cells Command Q. Now in Pages if I look at Quit, Command Q is gone from there because Command Q is now for Format, Table, Unmerge Cells. 
What's even better is I can continue to use Command Q to get rid of other menu items. So let me add Show Fonts again. Make that Command Q as well. Now Unmerge Cells is first. So it is going to get the keyboard shortcut. Show Fonts is going to miss out because it is using the same keyboard shortcut but it is in the list after Unmerge Cells. So now with Pages because Pages still had nothing Format Font, Show Fonts has nothing and only Format, Table, Unmerge Cells has Command Q. 
Another way to go would be to assign your Control, Shift, Command, Option, F12 to all the menu items you want to disable. Only the very first one on the list would actually get that keyboard shortcut which you wouldn't use anyway and the rest of them would just be blank. This would probably be the way to go in an app like Safari where you can look through all the different menus and it's really hard to find something that would always be grayed out. So in that case if I wanted to rid of Quit Safari I would add a new keyboard shortcut for Safari, for the menu item Quit Safari, and then make that something really obscure, like this, and add it. Now note what happens then is there is a menu hidden behind Quit Safari that's Option Command Q. Option Command Q gives you Quit and keep windows. It's harder to hit. But since we now have gotten rid of Command Q for Quit Safari this one is going to show through. But the result is the same. I can't use Command Q to actually quit. If I wanted the menu to look nice and neat I could just add Quit and keep Windows and give it the same keyboard shortcut like that. Now you can see it changes back to Quit Safari with that obscure shortcut here that I'll never accidentally trigger. 
So there are a bunch of different ways to disable specific keyboard shortcuts on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Disable a Keyboard Shortcut On a Mac”

Robert Gramling

2 years ago

In Messages, I often use RETURN to begin new paragraph, which sends the incomplete text. I know about the OPTION+RETURN command, but often forget. Is there a way to change this permanently? THX ! Bob

Gary Rosenzweig

Robert: No way to switch them. You just have to get used to remembering. Or, send a series of shorter messages. It all ends up in the same place anyway.

Harry

1 year ago

I use control for a command in a game I play, and f for another one. If I try and use them at the same time, though, it toggles fullscreen and messes me up. Is there a way to disable just ctrl+f, permanently?

Harry: Change the menu command for that one app then to something else.

Comments Closed.

How To Disable a Keyboard Shortcut On a Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Disable a Keyboard Shortcut On a Mac”

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