Six shortcuts that should be in your muscle memory
Do you take advantage of keyboard shortcuts on your Mac? If you don’t, you’re wasting tons of time.
I believe a keyboard shortcut is almost always faster than moving your hand to the mouse or trackpad, moving the pointer to the menu bar, then selecting an item from a menu or submenu. It drives me crazy when I see a user click on the Edit menu and choose one of its first six items: Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste or Select All.
Even if you never memorize another keyboard shortcut, those six should be embedded in your muscle memory:
• Undo: Command +Z
• Redo: Command + Shift +Z
• Cut: Command + X
• Copy: Command + C
• Paste: Command + V
• Select All: Command +A
If you’re in the habit of choosing any of these commands from the Edit menu, try using the shortcut instead for a few days. You’ll be surprised at how easy and natural it feels, and even more surprised at how much time you save.
But don’t stop at the Edit menu. Look in the menus of your favorite applications to see if a command has a keyboard shortcut.
In addition, I’ve memorized the shortcuts for the items in the Finder’s View menu that I use regularly: Command + 1 for Icon; Command + 2 for List; and Command + 3 for Column. (I also know the shortcut for Cover Flow view — Command +4—butI never use it.) Keyboard shortcuts also come in handy when moving the cursor and selecting text using the arrow keys. Pressing the Shift key and the up, down, left or right arrow key to select text above, below, before or after the cursor. Press Command or Option along with the Shift and arrow keys to select in different increments — by the word, sentence or paragraph.
Here are a few more shortcuts I use many times a day:
• Switch to next application: Command + Tab
• Switch to previous application: Command + Shift + Tab
• Take a picture of the screen: Command + Shift +3
• Close the active window: Command + W
• Close all open windows for this application: Command + Option +W
• Move selected item to the Trash: Command + Delete (or Backspace)
One last thing: I think keyboard shortcuts are so wonderful I created a free Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheet PDF you can print and tape to your display. Find it at: www. workingsmarter formacusers.com/free/.