Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Any Application

If you’ve been using your Mac for a while now, you undoubtedly know that you can use key combinations to save valuable time, rather than performing tasks via the menu bar. The most common examples of this includes command-C (copy) and command-V (paste). If you’ve never tried this before, simply click on a menu in any application, and you’ll notice that some menu commands have key combinations to the right of their names. If those combinations are present, you can hold down the command key and press the corresponding letter/number/etc. to perform that task. Note: sometimes, you have to hold down the command key along with the shift, option, and/or control keys.

Have you run across a task in a menu of one of your favorite applications, only to be disappointed that there’s no keyboard shortcut for it? Luckily, Apple has made it easy to add shortcuts to any application. Here’s how:

Finding Your Menu Item

I’m going to show you how to do this by demonstrating in iCal. Remember that you can do this in any Mac OS X application. The first thing you must do is find the exact menu item. Here’s what the iCal Calendar Menu looks like:

I’ve decided I want to add a key command for the menu item called Publish. Notice that there are three commands in this menu that have key commands (Subscribe, Refresh, and Refresh All), but Publish is not one of them. It is crucial that you recognize the exact name of the command. Here’s what I mean:

• Most items begin with a capital letter. This matters.
• Items that are two or more words (such as “Send Publish Email”) will need to be written exactly as shown. You can’t remove the spaces, and you can’t un-capitalize capitalized letters.
• Finally, and this is important, if the item has ellipses at the end of it, you must type three periods or ellipses when we get to the next step. Those periods are actually part of the item’s name.

Setting This Up in System Preferences

Now that you know the rules, let’s actually add the shortcut. Open up System Preferences and click on the Keyboard & Mouse system preference. From there, you need to click on the last tab called Keyboard Shortcuts. You will see a list of all the universal shortcuts (meaning shortcuts that work no matter what application you’re in). You might not know some of these, so it’s worth taking a look at.

At the bottom of the list will be any shortcuts you’ve added. To add a short cut, click the + button:

This will cause a new window to pop up, allowing you to add your shortcut. Here’s what my window looks like:

As you can see, I’ve done three things here:

1. First, I selected iCal from the Application list so that this shortcut will be used in (and limited to) iCal.
2. Second, I’ve entered the exact name of the menu command I want to add (including the capital “P” and the three periods after the word).
3. Third, I’ve created a keyboard shortcut. I chose option-command-P (you actually type the shortcut in the third box). That first character is the symbol for the option key . You can also use other keys: an up arrow is the shortcut for the shift key, and a carrot symbol represents the control key. If you hold down the option and command keys, then press P, you’ll get the same characters on this line as I did. What is important here is that you choose a key combination that does not already exist in the application you are modifying. If I had just selected command-P, which might make sense because of the name “Publish,” the new shortcut would not have worked, since command-P is already taken by the Print command.

Now, if you go back to your application and check your menu, the shortcut should be there!

That’s it! In my experience, you do not even need to quit and reopen the application. Once you’ve created the keyboard command, you’re done.

Did this tip work for you? Have a better way of accomplishing the same task? Have you found that adding certain key combinations has been a big timesaver for you? Let others know in the comments.

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Tagged as: apple, Keyboard, mac