Skip to Main Content
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition
book

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

by David Pogue
September 2012
Beginner content levelBeginner
762 pages
29h 25m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Keyboard Control

Mountain Lion offers a fantastic feature for anyone who believes 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.

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 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 see in a moment, you can change these key combos to anything you like. (The System Preferences→Keyboard→Keyboard Shortcuts tab contains the on/off switches for these features.)

Note

On modern-day aluminum keyboards, the keystrokes described below may not work unless you also press the Fn key simultaneously.

If that seems just a tad clumsy, then you can eliminate the Fn-key requirement either by using the “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys” option described in the box on A Tedious Side Note about the Aluminum Apple Keyboards—or by choosing a different keystroke altogether (Control Menulets).

Control the Menus

When you press Control-F2, the menu is highlighted. At this point, you can “walk” ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

David Pogue

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449338978Supplemental ContentErrata Page