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!
Late last year, 
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After switching to mail.app from Thunderbird, the blogger at 48-Hour Days found that that she (or he) couldn’t live without Thunderbird’s F8 keyboard shortcut for showing and hiding the Preview Pane.
MiniMail is a plugin that allows Mail.app users to minimise Mail’s interface into an “iTunes like” mini-format, instead of to the Dock. It must have come out when I was on a break from Hawk Wings, so a new Leopard-ready release gives me a chance to look it over.
Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has done all Gmail users an enormous favour with her 
Needless to say, with the labels feature and the extra keyboard shortcuts that Better Gmail provides, it is not very difficult to hack up a very efficient “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, which doesn’t have all the polish of the tailor-made 
Michael Boyle 
A poster on MacOSXHints 
