37 Secret Features of the Mac Keyboard

There is a ton of hidden functionality in the Mac keyboard that can unleash productivity power when you know about them. Learn how to type special characters, find hidden menu items, navigate around on the screen and so much more.


Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some secret features of your Mac's keyboard.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Of course you use your Mac's keyboard all day long for typing and for keyboard commands. But there are tons of hidden features that you may not know about. First there's an easy way to type Accent Marks. But it is something you have to know is there else you won't find it. It is simply to hold down a key to get alternatives. For instance, if I were to type a word like this and just press e all I get is the letter e. But if I want e with an accent mark I just hold the letter e on the keyboard and you can see alternatives will appear above. They will have numbers under them. All I need to do now is press a key matching the number, like 2, and I get that alternative to the letter e. This will happen for any letter as long as there is an alternative. So for instance for o I get that. For g I get that. But for a letter like say j there is no alternative so I don't see any options there.
Now another way to do this, that's always been around on the Mac, is to hold down the Option key and perhaps the Shift key as well to get some alternatives. So, for instance, instead of e here I'm going to type Option e and then you could see I get that little yellow highlighted character there for an accent mark. Now I type the letter that I want to use, in this case an e, but it could be another letter like an i for instance. I type that and then I get this same result. The trick is kind of knHi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some secret features of your Mac's keyboard.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Of course you use your Mac's keyboard all day long for typing and for keyboard commands. But there are tons of hidden features that you may not know about. First there's an easy way to type Accent Marks. But it is something you have to know is there else you won't find it. It is simply to hold down a key to get alternatives. For instance, if I were to type a word like this and just press e all I get is the letter e. But if I want e with an accent mark I just hold the letter e on the keyboard and you can see alternatives will appear above. They will have numbers under them. All I need to do now is press a key matching the number, like 2, and I get that alternative to the letter e. This will happen for any letter as long as there is an alternative. So for instance for o I get that. For g I get that. But for a letter like say j there is no alternative so I don't see any options there.
Now another way to do this, that's always been around on the Mac, is to hold down the Option key and perhaps the Shift key as well to get some alternatives. So, for instance, instead of e here I'm going to type Option e and then you could see I get that little yellow highlighted character there for an accent mark. Now I type the letter that I want to use, in this case an e, but it could be another letter like an i for instance. I type that and then I get this same result. The trick is kind of knowing those are there. Although most of the time it is pretty obvious. For instance if I do Option and then u then e you could see I get an e with two dots over it. I'll show you a way to find all of these a little later.
You can also use modifier keys to type alternatives to what you see on the keyboard. The only place you see this on the keyboard usually is above the number keys. So, for instance, 4 on a US keyboard if I type Shift 4 I get a dollar sign. Hold the Option Key will give you other things that you can't see on the keys. So Option 4 gives me cents. Option 7 gives me a paragraph symbol. Option zero gives me degrees. There are ones for letters as well. Like Option and j gives me a delta symbol. You can sometimes combine them. Like Shift Option and 2 will give me euros. You can even do Shift Option and k to get an Apple logo.
I'm going to show you how to find more of these in a little bit. But if you want access to all the different characters you can type then there are two keyboard shortcuts that will bring up a special Emoji & Special Character viewer. Either you can use the fn or Globe key and the letter e or you can use Control Command and Space. Sometimes though it will bring up suggestions first. This is new in macOS Sonoma. So if I type a word like this and use Control Command Space you could see it gives me suggestions. I can click on this little down arrow here or just do Control Command Space again and it will bring up the Emoji & Special Character viewer. Then I can Search for all sorts of special characters, including all the emoji or just browse through them. Use the categories below and everything.
Now the Option Key can also be used to change the Menu Bar. If I look in the Menu Bar here I'll see a list of Commands. But if I hold down the Option Key while a menu is visible notice how some of them will change to alternatives. Like Duplicate will change to Save As. You can see that Close will change to Close All. You can use these keyboard shortcuts. So while it shows that Command W is close, Option Command W is Close All. So you don't need to actually bring up the menus to use these special commands.
This works in Status Menus as well. So normally if I click the Sound button there I just get Volume and Output. But if I Option click you can see I also get Input Controls. This sometimes works in Dialogue Boxes. So, for instance, in Preview here if I do File and then Export now you look at the Format and you can see there are 7 here. But if I hold the Option Key down and select Format you can see I get a lot more.
I can also use the Option and Shift Keys to modify how Resizing works. So, for instance, in this TextEdit window I can click and drag the left side. But if I hold the Option Key then I'm dragging both the left side and the opposite side. The same thing, say, for the Top and the Bottom at the same time. When you drag a corner you can drag the top left corner or Option will drag the top left and the bottom right corners, essentially dragging all four sides. Now if you hold the Shift Key down and you drag anything it is going to drag that side and the two adjoining sides. So top, bottom, and left. Or if I do the corner here you could see how it's going to drag the top and the left but at the same ratio. It works in Apps too. So here I am in Pages and I've got a Shape here. I can drag, say, a side. But if I hold the Option Key down I'm dragging left and right. If I hold the Option Key down while dragging the top left corner it's dragging the top left and bottom right. The same thing with the Shift Key and all of the adjoining sides. Or the corner to keep the same ratio. In a lot of Apps you can even use the Command Key and drag to rotate.
Now I showed you before how you can bring up the Context Menu with, of course, a right click or two-finger click on a trackpad. But you can also do it with just a single click. Use the Control Key when you do that. Control besides a regular click brings up the Context Menu as an alternative to right clicking or two-finger clicking. This is very handy if you find you accidentally two-finger click on a trackpad say or click the wrong side of the mouse sometimes and you want to disable those in System Settings. You can still get to the Context Menus then using the Control Key and the regular click.
Now these modifier keys we've been talking about can be changed if you really want to. You go into System Settings and then go down to Keyboard. Then go to Keyboard Shortcuts. Go to Modifier Keys here on the list. Then you see a list of all the modifier keys, Control, Option, Command, and even the fn or Globe and you can switch what they do. For instance, you could switch the Control Key to be the Command Key and the Command Key to be the Control Key if you really want. This is handy if you've got a non-Apple keyboard and the keys aren't where you would expect them. So you could switch these.
Now while we're here there's also the ability to change how the Caps Lock Key works. So if you're like me and never use the Caps Lock Key then you could take Caps Lock and you could disable it so you don't accidentally press it. Or you could reassign it to one of the other keys. For instance, on a Mac Extended Keyboard you could assign it to the fn key so you have the ability to access that from the left side as well as from the right side of the keyboard. Or you could use it as a second Escape Key as well.
Now you may be thinking if you've got two of each of these keys to assign something different to say the right Command Key or the right Control Key. A lot of keyboards have each one of these three on both sides but it would be nice if you, say, never use the right Control Key to assign something else. There's no Option to do that here. But there is somewhere else. If you go to Desktop & Dock and then down to Mission Control there's a button here for Shortcuts. Then you've got 3 shortcuts for Mission Control. Mission Control itself, the application window also known as App Expose, and Show Desktop. You'll also find these in the keyboard panel but what you don't have there is the ability to select one of these a right or left side modifier key. So, for instance, if I never use the right Control Key, I always just use the left one, I can instead reassign only the right Control Key to bring up Mission Control or App Expose, or Show Desktop.
Now while the fn key is a modifier key, like Command, Control, and Option, it can also be used as its own keyboard shortcut if you just do a quick single press. Go into the keyboard settings and then look for the Press fn key 2. You can change it to Change Input Source, so you can switch between two types of keyboards, say English and French. Or you could have a quick press of it Show the Emoji & Special Character Viewer I showed you before, or you can have it start Dictation with 2 quick presses of fn. Or you can disable that so you don't accidentally trigger it.
Now also note that the Function Keys on the top of your Mac Keyboard seem to do different things. For instance F1 is typically Lower Screen Brightness or the F1 Shortcut. So if you have an App that assigns F1 to a special function then you may find that you need to press the fn key and then F1 to do it. Then the key by itself does Lower Screen Brightness. Or maybe it is the opposite way. You set that up by going into Keyboard Shortcuts and the Function Keys. Here's a Toggle. So when this is turned On then F1 is F1. If you want to lower screen brightness then it is the fn or Globe Key and F1. If you turn it Off and it is the opposite of that. You decide which way you want it set.
Now if you have a Mac Extended Keyboard then you've got keys like Forward Delete, Home, and Page Up and Page Down. But most Mac keyboards, like the ones on MacBooks don't have that. However the fn key gives you access to those things. For instance hold the fn or maybe the Globe key on your keyboard and then press the regular Delete Key and you could Forward Delete. You can also do Page Up and Page Down with fn down or fn and up. You can do End with fn and the right arrow and Home with fn and the left arrow.
Now speaking of the arrow keys, of course you can use the arrow keys in text to move forward, backward, down one line, up one line, and all of that. But you can hold the Option Key down and use Right and Left Arrow keys to jump by word. Then you could use Option and down arrow to go to the End of the Line and Option and up arrow to go to the beginning of the line.
Note that also you can use the Shift Key for a selection. So you may be used to using a trackpad or mouse and to click and drag to select something. But you can also do it with just the keyboard. So you can go to, say, where you want to start the selection, hold the Shift Key down and then use the right arrow to select letter by letter. Hold the Option Key down and you can jump by word. Hold down the Command Key and you can jump to the end of the paragraph. So it is just a matter of adding the Shift Key to extend selection rather than just moving.
Now the same works in the Finder. If you select one thing in List View in the Finder and you Shift Click you can select the whole range. Now if you want to select multiple items but they are not in a range, then you can select the first item and hold the Command Key down to select other items. You can even use this to deselect items from the selection as well. So I can select an item. Shift Click to select a range and then Command Click to deselect items.
Now sometimes it is nice to be able to navigate around inside of a Control. Like a dialogue box. I'll do Command S for Save here and if I Tab notice I go between the left sidebar to Save As Text, the Tags Text, and Search. You can extend that by going to System Settings and then going to Keyboard like before. Then turn On Keyboard Navigation. Now you can use Tab to move forward and Shift Tab to move backwards through many more things. So in this same Save Dialogue notice when I Tab now it is going to many more places covering all the different buttons and controls here. I can activate them with, say, just pressing the Spacebar.
Also when you're in a Dialogue Box like this you've got some Keyboard Shortcuts you may not know about. For instance, that Save button there would be nice to press s Just to Save. You can't actually press s but you can press Command S and it will Save. Also to Cancel you can either use Command and then Period or you could have done the Escape Key as well. You could also, for New Folder, do Command Shift N here. So there are ways to activate some of the items here in various dialogues. However, Command Period is pretty universal for any dialogue being able to cancel it. Typically, Return will activate the Default button. So in this case you can see Save is dark blue. If I were to press Return it would Save. I don't actually need to click the Save button
Now there are also some hidden typing features you may want to know about. If in System Settings Keyboard you go next to Input Sources Edit you can choose All Input Sources or just the one keyboard. Choosing All Input Sources allows you to set some things. One I want to point out is Capitalize Words Automatically. So if you were to do this and say start a new sentence it knows to change the first word to a capital letter. So if you get used to that, that can save you an extra key press.
Also I want to point out here the Add Period with double space. So this allows you at the end of a sentence, so instead of pressing Period Space you can press Space Space. It automatically replaces the first space with a period.
Now while we're here in Input Sources you've got a list of your keyboards here. You may just have the one keyboard that you actually own here or you can add an alternative here, if you want. But if you choose any of them you have you get this little mini keyboard here. It just confirms that,. yes you've chosen the keyboard that matches the physical keyboard that you've got. But notice that it reacts to modifier keys. So if I hold the Shift Key down you could see that the letters get capitalized and I see all the things that are on top of my Number row there. I can also hold the Option Key down. This is how you can find some of those characters I talked about earlier. So, for instance, the copyright symbol I can see is g but with the Option Key held down. I can hold Option and Shift down to see those alternatives. So this allows you to kind of find these special characters that you can easily type and see what else is available.
But if you do have another keyboard, like for instance, let's say that you've added the French keyboard here and you want to see how to type, say, the at symbol you could look here at the keyboard, this is with no modifier keys, I could hold the Shift key down and see what is available there. I can hold the Option Key down and then see that ahhh, the at key is actually over here with the Option Key held down.
Now you've got another app like this but it is not under Keyboard. It is under Accessibility. Go to Accessibility and then you go to Motor and Keyboard you can turn on the Accessibility Keyboard here. It comes up like this and works in a similar way. If I hold the Option Key down I can see the characters appear there and all the different modifier key combinations. I can also set this up in a lot of different ways. I've got a little button here at the top right and I can change the size of it. I can change the appearance to dark. I can make it semi-transparent or not. I can have it fade after an activity. There is a lot of things you can do. This is really an accessibility setting but you could use it to learn the special characters under Keyboard as well.
When we're here there are a few other settings. There is something called Sticky Keys which allows modifier keys to be set without having to hold the key down. So I turn this On and then I go over here and say I want to hold the Option Key down I can press the Option Key and notice at the top left of my screen I can see the Option Key is held down and now whatever I press reacts as if there is an Option Key held down and you can see how it goes away. Very useful if you can't hold down a key while typing another key. There are some customizable settings for this as well that you should check out.
Also under Accessibility there is a special hidden feature under Pointer Control called Mouse Keys. You turn this On then you can use keys on your keyboard, like the Numeric Keypad on the extended keyboard, or the keys centering around the letter k on a regular keyboard. You can use that to control the Pointer. So I'm using the 4 to move to the left, the 6 to move to the right, the 1 to move diagonally down and to the left, and so on. These would be letter keys on most Mac Keyboards if I go to the Help here and then I look for Mouse Keys. I can get to the page Apple has about that right here and you can see how the keyboard works. For normal typing, of course, you want that to be Off.
Now sometimes I get asked about typing Unicode characters. You can type just about any character you want with that Emoji & Special Character Viewer I showed you before. But if you happen to know the code for a special character you can type that as well. To do that you want to go into System Settings and back to Keyboard and you have to enable a special keyboard. So I'm going to go to Input Sources here. I'm going to scroll past all the languages, all the way to the bottom where it says Others. I'm going to select Unicode Hex Input and Add. Now I've got that as an alternative keyboard. You can see now I have the ability to switch between keyboards here. So I'll go back to typing and if I switch to Unicode the first thing I'll notice is I can type normally. But I can now use the Option Key, holding that down and type a special character. So, for instance, the character for infinity can be typed with 221E. So I'll hold Option and type 221E and I get infinity. So for those that prefer typing special characters that way you've got that Unicode keyboard. Of course you can always switch just back to the regular keyboard to disable that.
Now another keyboard that you can add here is called the Dvorak Keyboard. So, go under English and look at the different keyboards here. Notice you've got Dvorak, then there is a left-handed version, a right-handed version, and another alternative as well. If you select this notice the keyboard layout. So the Dvorak keyboard is a special keyboard where the keys are arranged perfectly to optimize typing. You, of course, have to learn a completely different way of typing and you have to ignore the letters that are on your keyboard. But there is a small but dedicated community that really likes typing this way and finds that they can type a lot faster. Here's a website that you can go to to read more about it.
Now before all the standard keyboard shortcuts that we know today, like Command C for copying, Command V for paste, there used to be other shortcuts that people used to use on computer terminals. Those keyboard shortcuts, which were mostly used in an app called Emacs, those are still actually available on the Mac. The most interesting ones are the Kill and Yank functions which are like Copy and Paste. You can use them like Copy and Paste. So I can select some text and I can use the Control key, not Command but Control, and K to cut basically from there and then Control and Y to yank it back. But they actually really work in a different way from Copy or Cut, and Paste because if you don't have text selected, if you just have the cursor right there, and you use Control K it actually cuts the entire rest of the line and then you can use Control Y to put it back. You can also though do that and then continue to do that and it will grab the character at the end of the line and then the next line and keep going. But it's all just been added to the buffer. So now when I do Control Y it's not the last thing that gets back there but everything in that sequence. So it is a very different way to work with Copy and Paste and it works in most Mac Apps where you edit text.
There are also a variety of other old Emacs commands that work. For instance you can use Control and F to go forward. Control and B to go back. Instead of the arrow keys you can use Control and D to delete forward and one that really doesn't have an equivalent to a single key anywhere is Control and O which will actually insert a new line at that position but leave the cursor there. So it is kind of the equivalent to a Return and then a left arrow to go back. It's a really easy way to insert a bunch of blank lines in the middle of a paragraph.
There are a bunch of other ones. These are ones that seem to work in just about any Mac App where you type text.
Now one of the frustrating things sometimes when typing into a text field is pressing Return will also work as an Action. So, for instance, I can type something like this and if I press Return it sends the message. What if I want to insert a new line instead so I have a multiline text. Well, you can usually do that using one of two modifier keys. So I can type something like this and sometimes you'll find that Option and Return will add a new line. Sometimes Shift and Return will add a new line. It really depends on the app you're using or sometimes the website you're typing into.
Now I mentioned before how you can change things like Volume and Screen Brightness using the Special Features keys at the top of your keyboard. So I can use the F2 key to increase brightness and notice how it goes in these various steps. The same thing with F12 for Up and F11 for Down for volume. If you hold Shift and Option you can actually do these in smaller increments. Look at how slowly the volume goes up and down. So you can kind of fine tune screen brightness or volume.
Now on the Menu Bar you have your standard keyboard shortcuts, like these here. But there is a very important hidden one and that's in the Help Menu to get to the Search Field. Notice there is no keyboard shortcut shown here. But Command and Question Mark, which means Command Shift and Slash on US keyboards, that will bring up the Help Menu and go right to the Search Field. You can use that, not just to search documentation but also to find menu items. So, for instance, if I wanted to find the superscript I just type super and you can see how it appears there. I can use the down arrow key to go down. It will show me where it is for future reference but it could also just select it from right here.
Now also, of course, if you want to access the Menu Bar you can do so using the keyboard completely. You can use that same Command Shift and Slash to go to the Help Menu but then left arrow and down arrow to any command that you want. Another way to do that is to use Keyboard Shortcuts that you could find in System Settings and then go under Keyboard and then to Keyboard Shortcuts and then from there go to Keyboard. You can see Keyboard Shortcuts to move the focus to the Menu Bar, in this case Control F2 and you can see that takes me to the Apple Menu and I can down arrow or right arrow around there. You also find other keyboard shortcuts to move the focus to the Dock, for instance, which is really handy.
If you ever want to change any of these keyboard shortcuts that you find in the Menu Bar you can also go into Keyboard Shortcuts and customize any of these. So, for instance, if I look at Screenshots here are all the screenshot keyboard shortcuts and I can disable or enable anyone of these. I can also double click here and reassign it if I want to. You also can add custom ones by going to App Shortcuts and then here you can click the Plus button and choose an application, indicate the Menu Title, and then set a keyboard shortcut for anything that you want. So you can not only change what these are but you could add keyboard shortcuts for commands that don't have any. Then while we're here you've got, under Text Input, you've got Text Replacement and you can have something here on the left that is replaced with something here on the right whenever you type it. Note that these can be really long things like I've got Exclamation point reply 1 and this will actually type out something pretty long. You could add or remove and edit these at any time that you like. It helps to have on the left side things that you would never type normally. That is why I put lots of punctuation here to the left of something and not actual words that you would normally type.
Here's one last one. Whenever you see an Alphabetical List know that you could probably use the keyboard to jump to an item. So, for instance, in this alphabetical list of the Documents Folder in the Finder if I were to type M notice how it jumps to the first item that begins with M. But you could also type multiple letters. So typing P would jump here. But Pe should jump there. So Pe and you could see how it jumps right there. This works in other places as well. So, for instance, if I click and hold Launchpad here in the Dock it's an alphabetical list of apps. If I were to type a letter it will jump right to that letter.
There's a look at a ton of secret hidden functions of your Mac keyboard. I hope you find some of these useful. Thanks for watching.owing those are there. Although most of the time it is pretty obvious. For instance if I do Option and then u then e you could see I get an e with two dots over it. I'll show you a way to find all of these a little later.
You can also use modifier keys to type alternatives to what you see on the keyboard. The only place you see this on the keyboard usually is above the number keys. So, for instance, 4 on a US keyboard if I type Shift 4 I get a dollar sign. Hold the Option Key will give you other things that you can't see on the keys. So Option 4 gives me cents. Option 7 gives me a paragraph symbol. Option zero gives me degrees. There are ones for letters as well. Like Option and j gives me a delta symbol. You can sometimes combine them. Like Shift Option and 2 will give me euros. You can even do Shift Option and k to get an Apple logo.
I'm going to show you how to find more of these in a little bit. But if you want access to all the different characters you can type then there are two keyboard shortcuts that will bring up a special Emoji & Special Character viewer. Either you can use the fn or Globe key and the letter e or you can use Control Command and Space. Sometimes though it will bring up suggestions first. This is new in macOS Sonoma. So if I type a word like this and use Control Command Space you could see it gives me suggestions. I can click on this little down arrow here or just do Control Command Space again and it will bring up the Emoji & Special Character viewer. Then I can Search for all sorts of special characters, including all the emoji or just browse through them. Use the categories below and everything.
Now the Option Key can also be used to change the Menu Bar. If I look in the Menu Bar here I'll see a list of Commands. But if I hold down the Option Key while a menu is visible notice how some of them will change to alternatives. Like Duplicate will change to Save As. You can see that Close will change to Close All. You can use these keyboard shortcuts. So while it shows that Command W is close, Option Command W is Close All. So you don't need to actually bring up the menus to use these special commands.
This works in Status Menus as well. So normally if I click the Sound button there I just get Volume and Output. But if I Option click you can see I also get Input Controls. This sometimes works in Dialogue Boxes. So, for instance, in Preview here if I do File and then Export now you look at the Format and you can see there are 7 here. But if I hold the Option Key down and select Format you can see I get a lot more.
I can also use the Option and Shift Keys to modify how Resizing works. So, for instance, in this TextEdit window I can click and drag the left side. But if I hold the Option Key then I'm dragging both the left side and the opposite side. The same thing, say, for the Top and the Bottom at the same time. When you drag a corner you can drag the top left corner or Option will drag the top left and the bottom right corners, essentially dragging all four sides. Now if you hold the Shift Key down and you drag anything it is going to drag that side and the two adjoining sides. So top, bottom, and left. Or if I do the corner here you could see how it's going to drag the top and the left but at the same ratio. It works in Apps too. So here I am in Pages and I've got a Shape here. I can drag, say, a side. But if I hold the Option Key down I'm dragging left and right. If I hold the Option Key down while dragging the top left corner it's dragging the top left and bottom right. The same thing with the Shift Key and all of the adjoining sides. Or the corner to keep the same ratio. In a lot of Apps you can even use the Command Key and drag to rotate.
Now I showed you before how you can bring up the Context Menu with, of course, a right click or two-finger click on a trackpad. But you can also do it with just a single click. Use the Control Key when you do that. Control besides a regular click brings up the Context Menu as an alternative to right clicking or two-finger clicking. This is very handy if you find you accidentally two-finger click on a trackpad say or click the wrong side of the mouse sometimes and you want to disable those in System Settings. You can still get to the Context Menus then using the Control Key and the regular click.
Now these modifier keys we've been talking about can be changed if you really want to. You go into System Settings and then go down to Keyboard. Then go to Keyboard Shortcuts. Go to Modifier Keys here on the list. Then you see a list of all the modifier keys, Control, Option, Command, and even the fn or Globe and you can switch what they do. For instance, you could switch the Control Key to be the Command Key and the Command Key to be the Control Key if you really want. This is handy if you've got a non-Apple keyboard and the keys aren't where you would expect them. So you could switch these.
Now while we're here there's also the ability to change how the Caps Lock Key works. So if you're like me and never use the Caps Lock Key then you could take Caps Lock and you could disable it so you don't accidentally press it. Or you could reassign it to one of the other keys. For instance, on a Mac Extended Keyboard you could assign it to the fn key so you have the ability to access that from the left side as well as from the right side of the keyboard. Or you could use it as a second Escape Key as well.
Now you may be thinking if you've got two of each of these keys to assign something different to say the right Command Key or the right Control Key. A lot of keyboards have each one of these three on both sides but it would be nice if you, say, never use the right Control Key to assign something else. There's no Option to do that here. But there is somewhere else. If you go to Desktop & Dock and then down to Mission Control there's a button here for Shortcuts. Then you've got 3 shortcuts for Mission Control. Mission Control itself, the application window also known as App Expose, and Show Desktop. You'll also find these in the keyboard panel but what you don't have there is the ability to select one of these a right or left side modifier key. So, for instance, if I never use the right Control Key, I always just use the left one, I can instead reassign only the right Control Key to bring up Mission Control or App Expose, or Show Desktop.
Now while the fn key is a modifier key, like Command, Control, and Option, it can also be used as its own keyboard shortcut if you just do a quick single press. Go into the keyboard settings and then look for the Press fn key 2. You can change it to Change Input Source, so you can switch between two types of keyboards, say English and French. Or you could have a quick press of it Show the Emoji & Special Character Viewer I showed you before, or you can have it start Dictation with 2 quick presses of fn. Or you can disable that so you don't accidentally trigger it.
Now also note that the Function Keys on the top of your Mac Keyboard seem to do different things. For instance F1 is typically Lower Screen Brightness or the F1 Shortcut. So if you have an App that assigns F1 to a special function then you may find that you need to press the fn key and then F1 to do it. Then the key by itself does Lower Screen Brightness. Or maybe it is the opposite way. You set that up by going into Keyboard Shortcuts and the Function Keys. Here's a Toggle. So when this is turned On then F1 is F1. If you want to lower screen brightness then it is the fn or Globe Key and F1. If you turn it Off and it is the opposite of that. You decide which way you want it set.
Now if you have a Mac Extended Keyboard then you've got keys like Forward Delete, Home, and Page Up and Page Down. But most Mac keyboards, like the ones on MacBooks don't have that. However the fn key gives you access to those things. For instance hold the fn or maybe the Globe key on your keyboard and then press the regular Delete Key and you could Forward Delete. You can also do Page Up and Page Down with fn down or fn and up. You can do End with fn and the right arrow and Home with fn and the left arrow.
Now speaking of the arrow keys, of course you can use the arrow keys in text to move forward, backward, down one line, up one line, and all of that. But you can hold the Option Key down and use Right and Left Arrow keys to jump by word. Then you could use Option and down arrow to go to the End of the Line and Option and up arrow to go to the beginning of the line.
Note that also you can use the Shift Key for a selection. So you may be used to using a trackpad or mouse and to click and drag to select something. But you can also do it with just the keyboard. So you can go to, say, where you want to start the selection, hold the Shift Key down and then use the right arrow to select letter by letter. Hold the Option Key down and you can jump by word. Hold down the Command Key and you can jump to the end of the paragraph. So it is just a matter of adding the Shift Key to extend selection rather than just moving.
Now the same works in the Finder. If you select one thing in List View in the Finder and you Shift Click you can select the whole range. Now if you want to select multiple items but they are not in a range, then you can select the first item and hold the Command Key down to select other items. You can even use this to deselect items from the selection as well. So I can select an item. Shift Click to select a range and then Command Click to deselect items.
Now sometimes it is nice to be able to navigate around inside of a Control. Like a dialogue box. I'll do Command S for Save here and if I Tab notice I go between the left sidebar to Save As Text, the Tags Text, and Search. You can extend that by going to System Settings and then going to Keyboard like before. Then turn On Keyboard Navigation. Now you can use Tab to move forward and Shift Tab to move backwards through many more things. So in this same Save Dialogue notice when I Tab now it is going to many more places covering all the different buttons and controls here. I can activate them with, say, just pressing the Spacebar.
Also when you're in a Dialogue Box like this you've got some Keyboard Shortcuts you may not know about. For instance, that Save button there would be nice to press Ask Just to Save. You can't actually press Ask but you can press Command S and it will Save. Also to Cancel you can either use Command and then Period or you could have done the Escape Key as well. You could also, for New Folder, do Command Shift N here. So there are ways to activate some of the items here in various dialogues. However, Command Period is pretty universal for any dialogue being able to cancel it. Typically, Return will activate the Default button. So in this case you can see Save is dark blue. If I were to press Return it would Save. I don't actually need to click the Save button
Now there are also some hidden typing features you may want to know about. If in System Settings Keyboard you go next to Input Sources Edit you can choose All Input Sources or just the one keyboard. Choosing All Input Sources allows you to set some things. One I want to point out is Capitalize Words Automatically. So if you were to do this and say start a new sentence it knows to change the first word to a capital letter. So if you get used to that, that can save you an extra key press.
Also I want to point out here the Add Period with double space. So this allows you at the end of a sentence, so instead of pressing Period Space you can press Space Space. It automatically replaces the first space with a period.
Now while we're here in Input Sources you've got a list of your keyboards here. You may just have the one keyboard that you actually own here or you can add an alternative here, if you want. But if you choose any of them you have you get this little mini keyboard here. It just confirms that,. yes you've chosen the keyboard that matches the physical keyboard that you've got. But notice that it reacts to modifier keys. So if I hold the Shift Key down you could see that the letters get capitalized and I see all the things that are on top of my Number row there. I can also hold the Option Key down. This is how you can find some of those characters I talked about earlier. So, for instance, the copyright symbol I can see is g but with the Option Key held down. I can hold Option and Shift down to see those alternatives. So this allows you to kind of find these special characters that you can easily type and see what else is available.
But if you do have another keyboard, like for instance, let's say that you've added the French keyboard here and you want to see how to type, say, the at symbol you could look here at the keyboard, this is with no modifier keys, I could hold the Shift key down and see what is available there. I can hold the Option Key down and then see that ahhh, the at key is actually over here with the Option Key held down.
Now you've got another map like this but it is not under Keyboard. It is under Accessibility. Go to Accessibility and then you go to Motor and Keyboard you can turn on the Accessibility Keyboard here. It comes up like this and works in a similar way. If I hold the Option Key down I can see the characters appear there and all the different modifier key combinations. I can also set this up in a lot of different ways. I've got a little button here at the top right and I can change the size of it. I can change the appearance to dark. I can make it semi-transparent or not. I can have it fade after an activity. There is a lot of things you can do. This is really an accessibility setting but you could use it to learn the special characters under Keyboard as well.
There are a few other settings. There is something called Sticky Keys which allows modifier keys to be set without having to hold the key down. So I turn this On and then I go over here and say I want to hold the Option Key down I can press the Option Key and notice at the top left of my screen I can see the Option Key is held down and now whatever I press reacts as if there is an Option Key held down and you can see how it goes away. Very useful if you can't hold down a key while typing another key. There are some customizable settings for this as well that you should check out.
Also under Accessibility there is a special hidden feature under Pointer Control called Mouse Keys. You turn this On then you can use keys on your keyboard, like the Numeric Keypad on the extended keyboard, or the keys centering around the letter k on a regular keyboard. You can use that to control the Pointer. So I'm using the 4 to move to the left, the 6 to move to the right, the 1 to move diagonally down and to the left, and so on. These would be letter keys on most Mac Keyboards if I go to the Help here and then I look for Mouse Keys. I can get to the page Apple has about that right here and you can see how the keyboard works. For normal typing, of course, you want that to be Off.
Now sometimes I get asked about typing Unicode characters. You can type just about any character you want with that Emoji & Special Character Viewer I showed you before. But if you happen to know the code for a special character you can type that as well. To do that you want to go into System Settings and back to Keyboard and you have to enable a special keyboard. So I'm going to go to Input Sources here. I'm going to scroll past all the languages, all the way to the bottom where it says Others. I'm going to select Unicode Hex Input and Add. Now I've got that as an alternative keyboard. You can see now I have the ability to switch between keyboards here. So I'll go back to typing and if I switch to Unicode the first thing I'll notice is I can type normally. But I can now use the Option Key, holding that down and type a special character. So, for instance, the character for infinity can be typed with 221E. So I'll hold Option and type 221E and I get infinity. So for those that prefer typing special characters that way you've got that Unicode keyboard. Of course you can always switch just back to the regular keyboard to disable that.
Now another keyboard that you can add here is called the Dvorak Keyboard. So, go under English and look at the different keyboards here. Notice you've got Dvorak, then there is a left-handed version, a right-handed version, and another alternative as well. If you select this notice the keyboard layout. So the Dvorak keyboard is a special keyboard where the keys are arranged perfectly to optimize typing. You, of course, have to learn a completely different way of typing and you have to ignore the letters that are on your keyboard. But there is a small but dedicated community that really likes typing this way and finds that they can type a lot faster. Here's a website that you can go to to read more about it.
Now before all the standard keyboard shortcuts that we know today, like Command C for copying, Command V for paste, there used to be other shortcuts that people used to use on computer terminals. Those keyboard shortcuts, which were mostly used in an app called Emacs, those are still actually available on the Mac. The most interesting ones are the Kill and Yank functions which are like Copy and Paste. You can use them like Copy and Paste. So I can select some text and I can use the Control key, not Command but Control, and K to cut basically from there and then Control and Y to yank it back. But they actually really work in a different way from Copy or Cut, and Paste because if you don't have text selected, if you just have the cursor right there, and you use Control K it actually cuts the entire rest of the line and then you can use Control Y to put it back. You can also though do that and then continue to do that and it will grab the character at the end of the line and then the next line and keep going. But it's all just been added to the buffer. So now when I do Control Y it's not the last thing that gets back there but everything in that sequence. So it is a very different way to work with Copy and Paste and it works in most Mac Apps where you edit text.
There are also a variety of other old Emacs commands that work. For instance you can use Control and F to go forward. Control and B to go back. Instead of the arrow keys you can use Control and D to delete forward and one that really doesn't have an equivalent to a single key anywhere is Control and O which will actually insert a new line at that position but leave the cursor there. So it is kind of the equivalent to a Return and then a left arrow to go back. It's a really easy way to insert a bunch of blank lines in the middle of a paragraph.
There are a bunch of other ones. These are ones that seem to work in just about any Mac App where you type text.
Now one of the frustrating things sometimes when typing into a text field is pressing Return will also work as an Action. So, for instance, I can type something like this and if I press Return it sends the message. What if I want to insert a new line instead so I have a multiline text. Well, you can usually do that using one of two modifier keys. So I can type something like this and sometimes you'll find that Option and Return will add a new line. Sometimes Shift and Return will add a new line. It really depends on the app you're using or sometimes the website you're typing into.
Now I mentioned before how you can change things like Volume and Screen Brightness using the Special Features keys at the top of your keyboard. So I can use the F2 key to increase brightness and notice how it goes in these various steps. The same thing with F12 for Up and F11 for Down for volume. If you hold Shift and Option you can actually do these in smaller increments. Look at how slowly the volume goes up and down. So you can kind of fine tune screen brightness or volume.
Now on the Menu Bar you have your standard keyboard shortcuts, like these here. But there is a very important hidden one and that's in the Help Menu to get to the Search Field. Notice there is no keyboard shortcut shown here. But Command and Question Mark, which means Command Shift and Slash on US keyboards, that will bring up the Help Menu and go right to the Search Field. You can use that, not just to search documentation but also to find menu items. So, for instance, if I wanted to find the superscript I just type super and you can see how it appears there. I can use the down arrow key to go down. It will show me where it is for future reference but it could also just select it from right here.
Now also, of course, if you want to access the Menu Bar you can do so using the keyboard completely. You can use that same Command Shift and Slash to go to the Help Menu but then left arrow and down arrow to any command that you want. Another way to do that is to use Keyboard Shortcuts that you could find in System Settings and then go under Keyboard and then to Keyboard Shortcuts and then from there go to Keyboard. You can see Keyboard Shortcuts to move the focus to the Menu Bar, in this case Control F2 and you can see that takes me to the Apple Menu and I can down arrow or right arrow around there. You also find other keyboard shortcuts to move the focus to the Dock, for instance, which is really handy.
If you ever want to change any of these keyboard shortcuts that you find in the Menu Bar you can also go into Keyboard Shortcuts and customize any of these. So, for instance, if I look at Screenshots here are all the screenshot keyboard shortcuts and I can disable or enable anyone of these. I can also double click here and reassign it if I want to. You also can add custom ones by going to App Shortcuts and then here you can click the Plus button and choose an application, indicate the Menu Title, and then set a keyboard shortcut for anything that you want. So you can not only change what these are but you could add keyboard shortcuts for commands that don't have any. Then while we're here you've got, under Text Input, you've got Text Replacement and you can have something here on the left that is replaced with something here on the right whenever you type it. Note that these can be really long things like I've got Exclamation point reply 1 and this will actually type out something pretty long. You could add or remove and edit these at any time that you like. It helps to have on the left side things that you would never type normally. That is why I put lots of punctuation here to the left of something and not actual words that you would normally type.
Here's one last one. Whenever you see an Alphabetical List know that you could probably use the keyboard to jump to an item. So, for instance, in this alphabetical list of the Documents Folder in the Finder if I were to type M notice how it jumps to the first item that begins with M. But you could also type multiple letters. So typing P would jump here. But Pe should jump there. So Pe and you could see how it jumps right there. This works in other places as well. So, for instance, if I click and hold Launchpad here in the Dock it's an alphabetical list of apps. If I were to type a letter it will jump right to that letter.
There's a look at a ton of secret hidden functions of your Mac keyboard. I hope you find some of these useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Keyboard Shortcuts (77 videos)
Related Video Tutorials:
The F-Keys and Special Features Keys on the Mac Keyboard ― 50 Mac Features Hidden Behind the Option Key ― My Secret Project (ClipTools) ― Using the Keyboard Navigation Option On Your Mac