Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

Keyboard Control

Mac OS X offers a fantastic feature for anyone who believes that life is too short: keyboard-controllable menus, dialog boxes, pop-up menus, and even Dock pop-up menus. You can operate every menu in every program without the mouse or add-on software.

In fact, you can operate every control in every dialog box from the keyboard, including pop-up menus and checkboxes. And you can even redefine many of the built-in Mac OS X keystrokes, like Shift-⌘-3 to capture the screen as a graphic.

In fact, you can even add or change any menu command in any program. If you're a keyboard-shortcut lover, your cup runneth over.

Here are some of the ways you can control your Mac mouselessly. In the following descriptions, you'll encounter the factory settings for the keystrokes that do the magic—but as you'll note in a moment, you can change these key combos to anything you like. (That's fortunate, since many of them, out of the box, conflict with canned brightness and volume keystrokes for PowerBooks and iBooks.)

Control the Menus

When you press Control-F2, the

menu drops down. At this point, you can highlight individual commands on that menu by pressing the up or down arrow keys, or even typing the first couple of letters of the command you want.

You move to a different menu by pressing the right and left arrow keys (or Tab and Shift-Tab). And you can "click" a menu command by pressing Enter, ...