Every Mac has a keyboard. I'm using mine to type this article, you used yours to find this web page. So, we all know how to use them. just press and you're good to go. Just so. However, Macs, being more than typewriters have a whole suit of clever clever things they can do if you just know what keys to press. Some of these keyboard commands are pretty straightforward, but some need several fingers at once and a few are easier with a couple of friends helping out!
Listing all the keyboard shortcuts for every Mac app would be sheer madness so I'm going to concentrate on the most useful and widely applicable ones that will hopefully get you out of a tight spot from time to time.
Start me up
T Key - Hold down at startup. Boots your Mac into firewire target mode. Essentially turns any mac into a simple external firewire hard drive. Connect to another Mac via a firewire cable and you can access your drive. Great for when your system goes bye bye. Laptops will display a yellow firewire symbol on the screen
C - starts your Mac from an available CD (hence) or other optical drive. Great for forcing your Mac to boot from a system DVD
space bar - hold it down on boot to force your Mac to spit out any stuck CD's or DVD's. Holding the mouse click down will do the same job.
alt key - hold down on startup to force your Mac to pick from any available OS's on any connected drives.
D - forces your Mac to start from the internal hard drive
cmd opt p and r (how many fingers) - resets computers pram. Mid level voodoo that clears some persistent faults.
cmd v - want to see everything that goes on when your Mac boots? Verbose mode shows you all the code behnd your Mac desktop loading in. Try it at work for full uber geek cred.
cmd s - single user. Mac gone all runny? Try this. When the gibberish stops steaming across your screen you can execute unix commands from the command line. Or wipe your hard drive. It's your mac without the graphic user interface
shift key - safe boot mode. Starts up a minimal OS X system. Useful to check if your Mac actually works without any of the stuff you use to you know, work.
cntrl alt esc - pops up force quit dialogue. For when your favourite app just won't go away!
Finder fun
cmd w - close a finder window
cmd opt w - close all finder windows NOW. Dive dive dive!
cntrl click - left mouse button for Windows users. Do clever stuff to files and folders
cmd tab - app switcher. Try it you'll never look back
cntrl eject key - miss that fancy shutdown command from older Macs? This brings up the power off dialogue.
Dude. WTF!
cmd shift L - sends any highlighted text to google for a search.
cntrl alt cmd 8 - inverts screen colours. Holy cow that's weird!
Quick
cmd shift H - go to home folder (from finder)
cmd shift A - straight to Applications folder (from finder)
There are plenty plenty more. Probably even Apples engineers don't know every command hidden away on your keyboard.
Posted on 10th Feb 2008
