Magic keyboard

Familiarising yourself with some common Mac keyboard shortcuts and cross-platform controls pays dividends

A. Magic Keyboard in Boot Camp

If you’re running Windows in Boot Camp or a virtualised environment, such as Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, use ç for the Windows key, å+≈ as a substitute for Windows’ Alt Gr key, ƒ+oe for Pause/Break, ƒ+® for Insert, and ƒ plus the …, æ, “or ‘ arrow key for Page Up, Page Down, Home and End respectively.

B. Multiple keyboards

If you’ve bought two or more keyboards with different language layouts, switch between them automatically by opening the Keyboard pane in System Preferences and putting a check mark next to ‘Automatically switch to a document’s input source’ in the Input Sources tab. Checking ‘Show Input menu in menu bar’ displays a national flag that, when clicked, lets you switch manually.

C. Acute advice

Alternatively, if you only occasionally need to type an accented character rather than writing in a foreign language all the time, hold down on the closest letter and wait for the accented options to pop up, then press the number listed below the one you want to type. So, for the German ß, hold S, then press 1 to match its position in the pop-up menu, or for an e with a circumflex, hold E and then press 3.

D. Share your keyboard

You don’t need to buy a Magic Keyboard for every device. When you’ve finished using your keyboard on one Mac, briefly connect it to another using its Lightning cable and, so long as the Mac’s Bluetooth is turned on, they’ll be paired and the keyboard will forget all about the last Mac it was used with. It’ll now stay paired to the new Mac until you next briefly plug it into another one.

E. Bluetooth wake-up fix

If pressing a key on your Magic Keyboard isn’t waking up your sleeping Mac, open System Preferences, click the Bluetooth icon, and then click the Advanced button at the bottom-right corner. Make sure the ‘Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer’ option is checked.