Super Sierra Shortcuts
GET TO KNOW YOUR FUNCTION KEY COMBOS AND YOU CAN ZIP FROM TASK TO TASK.
Use a Hot Corner as a superfast way to lock your Mac without logging out.
FORCE QUIT
The Force Quit key combo (CommandOption-Esc) is the quickest way to see which apps are unresponsive. They’re marked in the list this shortcut reveals, and there’s a button to force the selected apps to quit.
HIDE EVERYTHING
You may know that Command-H hides all of the active app’s windows, and that you can click the app’s Dock icon to bring them back. If you have a screen full of sensitive info in multiple apps, you might put the display to sleep using a method described at apple.
co/2frGvfl, which differ between models.
SECURE YOUR MAC
When leaving your Mac alone for a moment in a shared space, logging out is an extreme way to secure it, and it can take a while for your apps and docs to reopen if you do that. Instead, ensure a password is required to wake from sleep (in ‘Security & Privacy’ prefs) and in Mission Control’s prefs, click Hot Corners and set one of them to put the display to sleep when you move the pointer there (optionally only while holding a modifier key combo to avoid accidental activation). Triggering this behaviour returns you to the login window, but your account is still logged in and no apps or docs are closed in the process.
CLOSING AND REOPENING
Hold Option while clicking the ‘x’ on a tab in Safari to close all tabs except that one. If you accidentally close a tab (or window), pressing Command-Shift-T will bring it back; as of Safari 10, you can repeat this command to reopen windows or tabs closed further back in time, and in ‘History > Recently Closed’, you can reopen a specific page without having to step back through all those you closed later on.
CHECK YOUR SPELLING
Two useful shortcuts you should invoke before sending every email: either press CommandShift-; to open the ‘Spelling and Grammar’ window and start a spellcheck or — our favoured, quicker fix — Command-; which steps through misspellings. Some will be nouns and other words not in macOS’s dictionary, so you can press the latter combo to skip them. Another handy shortcut if you frequently type things like “teh”: Control-T swaps the characters either side of the text cursor.
MOVE OR COPY FILES
Dragging a file between two folders on the same drive moves it from one to the other, but doing so between different drives copies it. Hold Command when dragging between drives to move a file. Hold Option when dragging between folders on the same drive to create a duplicate. Holding CommandOption when dragging creates a shortcut (alias) to the original file.
FIND OUT WHERE YOU ARE
Hold Command and click the title of a Finder window to see a breadcrumb trail of folders back to the top of the drive and your Mac. Simply click an item in the list to open it. This works on document titles in many apps, too. (Microsoft Office apps use Control instead.)
SEE ALL OPEN SAFARI TABS
Press Command-Option-\ (or pinch together two fingers on your trackpad) to see
thumbnails of all open tabs, or use Control-Tab or Control-Option-Tab to advance right or left on the tab bar.
NAVIGATE WITHOUT A MOUSE
When your trackpad or mouse battery is flat, press Control-F2 (add Function if the F2 key defaults to being a screen brightness control) to move the focus to the menu, then use the arrow keys to move left and right through the menus; down arrow opens a menu and Return selects an item.
FOR WINDOWS SWITCHERS…
If you’ve come from a Windows PC, particularly one that has a keyboard with numeric keypad, doing simple things like deleting characters to the right of the insertion point, moving to the top or bottom of a document, or invoking pretty much any menu command that involves holding C on Microsoft’s operating system can cause much confusion initially. These docs will help you to adjust: apple.co/2fZOO6f, bit.ly/2goaQMO and apple.co/2gcHYb3.