Efficient Dexterity

A Commanding History

The keyboard shortcut found its origins in teletype machines. No joke! When Apple came of age, it used an  key as the foundation for multi-key commands, and later adopted the current ⌘ key, symbolizing a place of interest at a Swedish campground.

Shortcut Discovery

The easiest way to find existing Mac keyboard shortcuts is to browse the menus on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Start with the Apple menu in the top left and work your way to the right. You’ll see up to four symbols before the letter or number that completes a shortcut and these correspond to the four primary modifier keys:

1. Command: ⌘
2. Option (or Alt): ⌥
3. Control: ⌃
4. Shift: ⇧

I particularly encourage clients to seek out the commands they frequently target with the mouse and try using their shortcuts instead. Once you read the shortcut associated with a given command, try using it right away.

One thing you’ll commonly find on the Mac that is less consistent in Microsoft Windows is that many commands have the same shortcut across multiple applications. This is because Apple has clearly defined for developers the preferred shortcuts to use for various commands, not to mention the appropriate arrangement of the menus themselves.

You can peruse these specifications in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Unlike documentation associated with Windows PCs, I find even this technical writing easy to read and void of incomprehensible jargon.

MiOSsing Out?

While Apple’s mobile devices appear to lack the same kinds of keyboard shortcuts as the Mac, they are not devoid of such blessings. For starters, if you connect an external keyboard to your iPhone or iPad, you can use many of the same shortcuts you would use in equivalent Mac apps.

Additionally, one key shortcut previously exclusive on devices supporting the late 3D Touch was offered to all iOS devices supporting iOS 12 or later. Did you know you can use the keyboard as a trackpad?

Just hold the spacebar and the whole keyboard will fade out. Then, you can drag your finger around to move the cursor. As of iOS 13, you can also tap with another finger to start selecting text and expand the selection by moving the cursor with the first finger.

Accent on Hold

To access accented characters and a handful of other symbols, touch and hold a key and slide up to select the desired character. Not every key supports this but don’t hesitate to just try it out and discover what’s where.

Similarly, when typing a website or email, slide up on the period key to access .com and some other common top-level domains.

Symbolic Bonus

iPad’s generous screen size affords its keyboard some advancements not offered on iPhone. Once upon a time in iOS 11 or later, when you first tapped the .?123 key to access punctuation and symbols, iOS would have notified you of an alternative approach.

The larger iPad keyboard keys show an additional character, most of them in gray. Slide the key down and the gray symbol turns black; release and it’s inserted, and the key turns back to normal.

If you do press .?123 first, you’ll find the extended symbols on the keys, the ones accessed by pressing #+=. Likewise, you can slide a key down to type the hidden character.

Note: This doesn’t apply to the 12.9″ iPad Pro, which already sports a full-size keyboard.