Mastering The Mac Keyboard

October 10th, 2006

Mastering The Mac Keyboard

It sounds pathetic, and it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but sometimes I still use my mouse to move my cursor up to the top left of the page to select File / Print.
So, when I say I have never really taken full advantage of keyboard shortcuts, it is a slight understatement.

Since I’ve switched to primarily using a Macbook, I find myself often working without a mouse and it has been motivation to actively burn keyboard shortcuts into my memory.

One thing I have in my favor is that I don’t have to deal with any frustration caused by differences in Mac and PC shortcuts since I didn’t really know them on PC.
Well, that’s a postive way of looking at my keyboard ignorance.

At the moment, I have a long list of general Mac OS X shortcuts that are available on the Apple site. So far, I’m getting a lot of use out of the screen capture shortcuts which, by default are:

Command-Shift-3 : Take A Picture Of The Screen
Command-Shift-4 : Take A Picture Of Selection (select after shortcut)

Now, if you don’t like the number 3, you can easily set a custom shortcut instead of the defaults.

Choose Apple Menu / System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse
Then, choose Keyboard Shortcuts tab on the right
Highlight the shortcut you want to change and hold down the new keys

The one shortcut I don’t understand is:
Command - Eject (two buttons) will open the Restart, Sleep, Shutdown dialog box .
If I press the power button (one button) once, I get the same dialog box.
Am I missing something?

Just so I don’t get bored, I also have a handy reference of shortcuts for Photoshop CS2 at my side so I can master those as well and hopefully I can eventually save myself a lot of time.

Once I’ve mastered the keyboard basics and Photoshop shortcuts, I’ll tackle the iTunes list. If it doesn’t work out, I could start using voice recognition software so I never have to type again! The shortcuts may be difficult to learn though.

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