Essential Keyboard Shortcuts for MacOS You Must know

Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

How many of you know about keyboard shortcuts that are beyond Ctrl C and Ctrl V? I guess not many of you. These shortcuts make our life way easier than one could ever thought of. According to a research an individual can save around 8 days in a year by just drilling some of the keyboard shortcuts. So today I thought of enlightening our readers about the Mac keyboard shortcuts that can help their fingers from juggling between mouse and keyboard.

Cut, Copy & Paste

Let’s start with something very basic. Something that we have learned from our childhood. Our very own Cut, Copy and Paste command. Command X, Command V and Command C for cut, paste and copy respectively. The commands that will help you everywhere. Be it any editor.

Additionally, there are some features in the editors like TextEdit and Pages, where you can adopt the style of the word where you are adopting. This is what we call “Paste and Match Style” which is present in Edit menu.

If you want the “Paste and Match Style” to be configured in all the apps, you are working on in your Mac then definitely you should perform the steps given below.

  • Search for System Preferences’ Keyboard pane.
  • Go to shortcuts tab the further click the + beneath the box on the right.
  • Then choose the application where you want the “Paste and Match Style” feature in the prompt window.
  • In the “Menu Title” type “Paste and Match Style”.
  • Click the bottom box and press Command + V.
  • Lastly click the add button to add this feature to the applications.

In Microsoft word also, we have this feature but with different name ‘Paste and Match Formatting’. Let’s move further to some other interesting commands.

Undo and Redo

You always have the chance to undo your mistakes. Like human beings that’s what our computers believe and are built on. There are shortcuts to undo and redo your mistakes.

Want something back, that you have accidentally deleted moments ago? You can fix this issue by just holding together these two keys for a second – Command + Z.

And if you have not saved your data and want it back the way it was, means in simple terms that you want to redo your data. Then press Shift + Command + Z.

Switching Apps

We live in the world of multitasking. Its quite often that we often multiple tabs in our laptops. We keep on juggling between them.

  1. The option of CTRL tab will let you shuffle between your recent apps. Hold the Ctrl and release tab that will open the current window.You can use left and rights keys to further navigate through the icons.
  2. Select Tab to move left and Shift Tab will help in moving right.
  3. The key H will hide the select window and Key Q will quite the selected window.
  4. Up key will let you see all the selected window.
  5. After using the last two steps you can return to your desktop screen.

Taking Screenshots

If you want to take the screenshot, which sometimes in some applications becomes messy, but here in macOS Mojave, you can do that by pressing altogether Shift+Ctrl+5.

The shortcut will open a screenshot toolbar where you can further choose various options such as timer, location of the screenshot to be saved, whether pointer is to be included in the picture taken etc. etc.

Hide and Minimize Windows

Very often I have seen people doing work with a lot of tabs open in their chrome and in fact on their desktop which makes it difficult to navigate across important screens. So, this one is for them, to make their life easier. Try and then thank us later!

  1. Command + H and Command+Option+H are the very important shortcuts by which you focus only on the screens that are crucial for you, quitting the ones that are unnecessary.
  2. Ctrl+H will hide the current application’s window while the other one will hide all other application windows apart from the current application’s window.
  3. For minimizing the current window in the dock, press Ctrl + M.
  4. You can even change the location where the minimize app will get store.

Force Quit an Unresponsive App

If ever you are stuck with application where you are unable to perform any action. Then this command will come into picture. You need to kill the app which has become unresponsive. The shortcut will help you in force quitting the app.

Option + Command + Esc is the option we are talking about. Note that: Whenever you will use this shortcut, you will lose your entire unsaved data.

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