Mac refresh
Commands at your fingertips
There are clever ways to make all your commands happen
W
hile we value touch-scrolling
Magic Mice and gesturesensing Magic Trackpads, the Magic Keyboard is often the fastest way to activate commands.
Even as the Mac’s legendary role as cursor-armed slayer of the greenscreen command line slips into the same mists as St George’s, there’s a bit of an aversion, chez Cupertino, to keyboard navigation. But if you know your way around, with a few tweaks, you can invoke many of the commands you need without having to point a little arrow at them.
1 Keep tab with Tab
You probably use Tab to move between text fields. You may know you can use it to switch the blue outline between buttons in a dialog box, then press [spacebar] to click ↵ selects the solid blue button regardless). You may have noticed pressing Tab in the Finder highlights the next file in alphabetical order, even if they’re not shown in that order. Witchcraft! But it can do more.
In System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, tick ‘Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls’ (previously Full Keyboard Access). You can now use Tab to scoot your blue box around most of the interface in any window. Press [spacebar] to click the outlined item. Safari has a similar tweak for tabbing within web pages in Safari > Preferences > General > Accessibility. Sadly, Big Sur’s Control Centre and widgets can neither be invoked with key shortcuts, nor do they respond to Tab.
2 Pull focus
In System Preferences > Keyboard, go into Shortcuts and select Keyboard on the left. As well as key shortcuts to turn Tab navigation on and off, you’ll find combos to ‘move focus’ to various different interface areas. You probably already use ⌘+`, which switches you to the next window within an app. Check out the other options, including ctrl+F3, which moves focus to the Dock, showing it if it was hidden. Unlike with the more familiar ⌘+⌥+D shortcut, you can then use the ▸ and ◂ arrow keys to select a Dock item and press ↵ to launch it or the ▴ arrow to show its contextual menu. These shortcuts use function keys by default, but if that’s not convenient (hi, Touch Bar owners!), just click the combo shown and press whatever keys you prefer to use. You’re warned if the same shortcut is already assigned elsewhere.