Hawk Wings reader Adam sends in this tip for creating a custom keyboard shortcut that adds a hyperlink to an email in Mail.app without the need to go searching through its menu options.
Hawk Wings has covered creating bespoke shortcuts before as well as the virtues of moving around in Mail.app using only the keyboard. Few things do more to speed up your email workflow.
So, you can never post often enough about keyboard shortcuts, and this is a good one.
Adam writes:
In Mail.app I wanted ⌘K to be my shortcut for adding a link in the body of a message. But the command is usually only available via the submenu Link > Add… under the Edit menu. On a whim, I went to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, hit the plus sign and in the box for Menu Title entered “Add…” (no quotes, and using Option-Semicolon for the elipsis). It worked!
If you are a visual learner, this screenshot of the process Adam describes might help too:
Mail.app then kindly adds the new shortcut to your menu, so that you never forget it:
Once you get the taste for it, you won’t want to stop there. Add another to insert a bulleted list (if you go for those):
Of course, both these examples are for Rich Text people. I can’t bring myself to abandon plain text — there’s something noble about it, something efficient, something respectful of the recipient’s settings for displaying text; it’s the way our forefathers did email.
But I recognise that I am a dinosaur in these matters.
Great tip, Adam. Thanks!
Thanks so much for posting this tip! I’ve been trying to find a way to make a keyboard shortcut for adding links for a long time.
What was so surprising is that to add a hotkey to a command that’s one submenu level down **you simply pretend that it isn’t.**
I also still do my mails in plain text.
I find it very difficult to post a comment here.
But back to keyboard shortcuts – if you want to do something like in the menu, but don’t do it often enough to create a specific shortcut, you can just hit ?? to bring up the help menu, type “link add”, and the menu item is selected for you. Hit Enter, and voila! It’s like spotlight for menus.
I use this for showing the BCC field – hit ??, type BCC, hit down arrow once, and hit enter. Repeat the action to hide the field.
Maybe I’m just not understanding what this really helps with. How does pasting a URL into the Link>Add… window differ from simply pasting it into the email directly? I send links to people all the time and have never used that window.
@Lee: Is this a serious question?
It’s the difference between A Nifty Web Site and http://www.hawkwings.net/
Is that for Mail in Leopard only? I couldn’t get it to work in Tiger.
My previous comment, the “??” should be Command-? (squiggly didn’t come through) to bring up the help menu.
Also, you can’t type “bcc colon” in the comments – as a website programmer I know why (spambots suck!), but it can be frustrating when you just get a generic message saying “Failure: some condition somewhere returned false”.
Yes, it was a serious question, but I’ll be sure never to ask one again. Thanks.
Lee, I hope I didn’t offend. I just wondered if it was some ironic remark about Mail.app’s ability to display the hyperlink in a tooltip, thus rendering some of the advantages of “plain text” hyperlinks void. Or something.
@Katherine: Tiger seems so long ago. My recollection is that this worked fine in Tiger though.
Thanks for the great tip. I had tried this a long time ago but I did not know the shortcut for elipses. There are some other apps that have elipses in their titles so I could not access them.
I use xgestures to control many menu items and some of them have ellipses so I could no accesses them as ” . . . does not equal …”
Wow, thank you so much. I have just recently started using Mail exclusively (when gmail added imap support) and have been sitting here pulling my hair out. No link support except for through a dropdon submenu? Absolutely absurd. I thought for sure that there was an “appearance” or “view options” preference I must have missed, but no. Inexcusable! Sure, some people may not find it necessary to create nice links, but in 2008 an oversight like this is just silly. Man, I love Apple, but when they miss something, they REALLY miss.
Again, Thank You!
“Keyboard Shortcut to add hyperlinks in Mail.app”
As Katherine Lent commented;
Tried it out in Tiger Mail, did not work.
The apple-key + K, returned an Q if I wanted to erase every mail in my account.
The menu-item in question did not appear in my GUI.
I´m on OS X 10.4.11 and Mail Versjon 2.1.2 (753/753.1).
So hawkwings; an app-test prior to promoting something smart, will be nice.
You may have done so, but I could not find any version-references regarding this tweak, at the site.
Otherwise; your site is OK. -but looking for something in an more easy manner, will improve your sites standing.
I don´t know if this site is controlled by a NGO or others.
Thanks for your very good work and initiative.
Best regards, Terje Christiansen, Oslo, Norway.
In answer to those having trouble under Mac OSX Tiger 10.4.x, the Mail.app menu layout and naming is slightly different in the older version. In place of typing “Add…” in the System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts box’s “Menu Title” field, type exactly “Add Hyperlink…” instead.
You then just need to restart your Mail.app for the change to take effect. Worked for me!