Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's look at adding your own custom keyboard shortcuts to menu items.
A common thing I'm asked is why there is no keyboard shortcut for some menu item.
So for instance I was recently asked in Mail here if you want to access the field for Cc
you've got no shortcut.
For bcc you've got a shortcut but there is no shortcut here for cc.
Well the thing a lot of people don't realize is that you can create your own.
You can set this.
And this isn't something special in Mail.
This works in any app that uses Menu here at the top.
So let's, as an example, create a shortcut here for the Cc Address Field.
It's really easy to do.
We're going to do this first by carefully noting what the exact text of this field is
here.
So it's Cc, space, Address, space, Field.
We're going to remember that and we're going to go to System Preferences.
In System Preferences we'll go to Keyboard and then we'll go to Shortcuts.
Shortcuts here has a whole list of different things including App Shortcuts at the bottom.
We can add our own app shortcut and we want to set it for a specific application in this
case.
We could set it for All Applications but it is unlikely that other apps are going to have
this exact same menu item.
In other cases you may want to do that.
But I'm going to select Mail here and I'm going to type in exactly what I saw.
It has got to be perfect.
So if anything you've missed, any space or the exact spelling of a word, it is not going
to be there.
And I'm going to do Command Option C and I'm going to hit Add.
You can see it adds it here.
It adds Mail app to the list of shortcuts.
You can expand and collapse these.
It says Cc Address Field is Option Command C.
Now if I switch back to Mail here and go to View, sure enough there it is.
It just added it right there.
So now I can actually use that keyboard shortcut instead of selecting here I can do Option
Command C and you can see it adds or removes the Cc field.
So you can not only do that to create shortcuts for something that is missing like for instance
Expand AllConversations or Collapse All Conversations.
You can add those as keyboard shortcuts as well.
But you can change ones that are there.
So I can, for instance, if I wanted to get the Bcc Address Field and change that to something
else I can do that as well.
Go to System Preferences and create a new app shortcut for Mail and I get the exact
spelling there.
I'm going to do something a little different and add the Control key to that and I'm going
to hit Add.
Now when I go in here, go to View, you can see that it has altered that one.
So you can't remove them but you can actually go ahead and alter what they are.
One thing to be mindful of is some Menu item shortcuts are actually set dynamically.
For instance, in Safari here if I were to go to Bookmarks and Favorites notice that
I've got these shortcuts here for some of my favorites.
These are very handy.
Option Command 1, Option Command 2, etc.
These are actually set by the order of things in your Bookmarks' Favorites folder.
You can actually see them.
If I go here I can see the Favorites bar here.
If I go Show Favorites it will come up in the same order here.
If I Edit Bookmarks they will come up here.
So if I were to switch Apple and iCloud, for instance, now iCloud is first.
If I go to this menu, Favorites, you can see iCloud is there.
So don't get frustrated trying to change these or look for similar things in other apps that
you use where they are populated automatically and changing them is not going to work through
System Preferences.
But there is actually an easier way to change or modify those inside the app.