Sometimes things aren’t as easy as they could be when you’re using your Mac to plow through the day’s tasks. Cluttered screens and excess clicking become irritating and tiresome. In today’s video, we take a look at five useful Mac shortcuts that can make using your Apple computer even more efficient.
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22 responses to “5 handy shortcuts that will make using your Mac painless”
I also like Command + Shift + 4. This allows you to create a screen shot the same way as Command + Shift + 3, but let’s you select a region of your screen, rather than the whole screen. It’s very useful for getting images when creating documentation or instructions.
^^^ This. Awesome for cherry picking parts of web pages or grabbing a tweet to put on your FB as a picture.
Command + Shift + 4 and then hitting Space is even better.
Holding down the CTRL key along with Command Shift 4 or 3 will place the screenshots in your clipboard so that you don’t clutter up your desktop with PNGs, and the image will be immediately available to paste wherever you need it.
Hey! You stole my comment! TheMadTurtle is exactly Command+Shift+3 is nice but Command+Shift+4 is better and is the quick Mac approach to the snipping tool.
name of the website+/. A .com shortcut. For example: facebook+/ = facebook.com. Try it!
And with Dropbox installed, you can set it to save screenshots in the cloud.
name of the website+/. A .com shortcut. For example: facebook+/ = facebook.com
Here’s a useful shortcut to bypass the 2 minute movie above:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343
Also learn gestures and hot corners for the win.
Knowledge Base! Funny :)
In a text field: option-8 for a bullet (the asterisk is a nice reminder), option-shift-8 for a degree symbol. These and the cmd-shft-3 & -4 for screen shots are ones I’ve been using since System 7.
How I hate video posts! Why in hell do I have to spend 2min of my life to access a content easily readable in 15s?
:-/
I used to feel that way when I had bad wifi.
Also when you hold down cmd tab to shuffle through the app if you release the tab you can push the ` key to go shuffle backwards just incase you missed the app you were looking for!
cmd+shift+tab also shuffle backwards.
Control+Shift+Eject puts the display to sleep which I find the definitive way to announce the end of a work day!
And it’s helpful if you like to lock your Mac up before leaving the room.
I’ve been looking FOREVER for that one, thank you!
COMMAND + ` scrolls through your open windows within the current program. Great if you have multiple emails open, multiple browser windows etc.
command + ` (scrolls clockwise)
command + shift + ` (scrolls anti-clockwise)
Beginner course! Exposé is a lot better…
Expose has huge flaws if you’re a “power user”. If you know how to utilise the keyboard properly your workflow will be so much faster. If you’re word processing you ideally want to keep your hands on the keyboard at all times. You can flick between your reference material and your word processor with two simple shortcuts. Flicking between windows with expose takes far longer simply because you have to take your hands off the keyboard.
Control+Command+Space
The emoji shortcut.
This one is a custom shortcut: Command+X to go in and out of full screen on apps.
Full screen was the highlight of OS X Lion and I plan to use it easily.