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

Shortcut Menus, Action Menus

It’s part of the Mac’s user-friendly heritage: You can do practically everything using only the mouse. Everything is out front, unhidden, and clickable, whether it’s an icon, a button, or a menu.

But, as in Windows, you can shave steps off your workload if you master shortcut menus: little menus that sprout out of things you right-click, offering commands that the software thinks you might want to invoke at the moment, as shown in Figure 3-13.

To summon one, just right-click or two-finger click something—an icon, the desktop, a window, a link in Safari, text in a word processor, whatever. You can also trigger these shortcut menus with special clicks on your trackpad or Magic Mouse; see Right-Clicking and Shortcut Menus for additional options.

In any case, a menu drops down listing relevant commands: Get Info, Move to Trash, Copy, and so on. You can click the command you want, or type the first couple of letters of it and then tap the space bar.

These menus become more useful the more you get to know them. The trouble is, millions of Mac fans never even knew they existed. That’s why there’s a second way to access them. At the top of every Finder window, you’ll find a pop-up menu, technically called the Action menu (Figure 3-13, right).

Figure 3-13. These pop-up ...