Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

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 laptops.)

Control the Menus

When you press Control-F2, the menu is highlighted. At this point, you can "walk" to another menu by pressing the ← or → keys (or Tab and Shift-Tab).When you reach the menu you want, open it by pressing ↓, Space, Return, or Enter.

Walk down the commands in the menu by pressing ↑, or ↓, or jump directly to a command in the menu by typing the first couple letters of its name. Finally, ...