Make your own Apple Mail shortcuts
Thursday, October 27th, 2005Buried 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.app