Make your own Apple Mail shortcuts
Buried away in OS X’s System Preferences is the little-used ability to add or modify
If you open the “Keyboard and Mouse” Preference Pane in System Preferences and then select the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab, you will see a list of existing shortcuts like this:
The shortcuts that control screenshots, keyboard navigation, using the Dictionary, opening Spotlight and so on are all there.
Down the bottom is a section for adding application-specific shortcuts. Here you can do two things to make
You can add a keyboard shortcut for any menu command. Click on the plus sign, select
You will see in the screenshot that I have added two. Control-Option-Command-1 now sets the priority of a message I am composing to “High”. I only know one person with a
I’ve also added a shortcut for “Add Hyperlink…” (Option-Command-H) for those rare times when I am composing an email in Rich Text. Again it’s quicker than mousing up to the Message menu and selecting it from here.
Modifying Shortcuts
You can also change the shortcuts assigned by default to various commands in
Two years after switching from Windows, that still doesn’t make sense to me. So, I’ve changed it to Shift-Command-S. I could have changed it to Command-S but then I would lose that shortcut as a way to save an email as a draft. The default Shift-Command-S command, “Save as…” I never use, so I don’t miss giving it up.
One word of caution. Setting up your own shortcuts is fun and helps you work quicker on your own Mac. But the more you change, the more out of sync you get with the rest of the Mac-using world. If you ever need to use another Mac, your shortcuts won’t work, your fingers will instinctively do the wrong thing and you’ll have forgotten the default shortcuts. Sometimes it is smarter just to learn the new or odd shortcut.
Tags: Adding shortcuts, Apple Mail, hotmail, keyboard shortcuts, mail, mail.appRelated posts
November 2nd, 2005 at 9:41 am
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January 4th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
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January 27th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Brilliant pointer.
Have wanted to change my Send Again menu from CMD+SHFT+D to the SHFT+ENTER that Entourage uses for sometime.
Unfortunately, doesn’t seem like your “hack” works — at least on my PowerBook running 10.4.3.
What version of the OS do you use?
January 27th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Hmmm…. That’s odd.
Shift-Enter might not be a valid combination or it might already belong to something else which could cause a problem.
When you say it doesn’t work, do you mean that it doesn’t work at all, or that it doesn’t work for that particular keystroke combination?
Can you get it to set to something else like (for example) Shift-Command-S?
March 9th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Is there a way to create a keyboard shortcut to “Go To” the “Received” mailbox that I created? Wish there was a way to have Command-7 or Command-8 for a couple mailboxes that I created, but it won’t go beyond Command-6.
March 9th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Paul — I don’t think that there is a way to do this. It only works with the default, “hardcoded” mailboxes.
But I would be very pleased to be proved wrong.
November 15th, 2006 at 1:46 am
Hi
I would like to recreate the pine shortcut for saving messages which saves me an enormous amount of time. If I press the save key, I am prompted for a folder to which the messages should be saved. When the sender is in my addressbook, the default folder name is the same as the nickname of the sender. Otherwise it is ’saved-messages’. Now, since I have folders corresponding to nicknames, the entire save message to folder typically only takes s followed by the return key. What with 100’s of emails a day (and over 1000 folders - I have been emailing for over 20 years), this feature is essential for keeping my inbox in a reasonable state.
Any ideas how to implement the automatic folder-name prompting in response to a single key press?
November 15th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Hmmmm….. Not really. There is an extension for Thunderbird that does what you describe, but nothing exactly like that for Mail.app.
I use Mail Act-on for my keystroke-savvy filing, but I don’t have a thousand folders.
November 16th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
@Michael: Just released — MsgFiler
November 17th, 2006 at 5:34 am
Ah, Tim, that’s more like it! MsgFiler is a nice package. Apple-9 foldername enter enter is *much* faster than using the mouse.
With some modifications, it ought to be able to ‘learn’ where messages are likely to be filed, so that it would suggest the likely folder to go to without the user having to type in the foldername.
Many thanks, to you & the developers of msgfiler.
January 14th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I tried to put a “Add Hyperlink…” keyboard shortcut but it doesn’t seem to work. I used command-shift-H. I tried using command-option-H but that’s assigned to hiding all applications except for the current one. I typed Add Hyperlink… exactly but no go. Using Tiger by the way.
April 11th, 2008 at 6:12 am
It appears that if you want to replace an existing shortcut “x” with a key combination “y” that is assigned elsewhere, you must also explicitly replace “y” before your new “x” will appear. If you don’t it just removes the default assignment for “x.” (OS X 10.4.11, Mail 2.1.3)
June 25th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Thanks so much!! That’s a brilliant tip.
As you mentioned, the default keyboard shortcut to send a message is ?-Shift-D. This is possibly one of the worst annoying-little-blunders I’ve found in OS X.
In the finder, I use that shortcut ALL THE TIME. It goes to your desktop. Lets say I’m in the middle of composing a critical message to my boss. Normally, when I want to attach a file, I can click over to the finder, hit ?-Shift-D to get to my desktop, and then drag it in. If I should happen to miss when switching over to the finder, and then hit ?-Shift-D, I just sent an unfinished email to my boss!
Thanks for your tip. I decided to use ?-Return, which I believe is the default command that my fingers remember from my Entourage days.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Tried to get clever and use a Command symbol, but it came out as ? instead. Oh well.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Do you have idea how I can set shortcut for “Message -> Move to -> custom email folder”