What do you know about the ellipsis? This character has become commonplace to represent the “More” menu in various mobile applications. But what about on the Mac?

How often do you explore the menu bar? That’s the strip at the top of the Mac screen. Have you noticed an ellipsis trailing various menu commands?

The sole purpose of the ellipsis is to indicate that after issuing a command, another step is required before the named action will occur.

Save… & Print…

In a document-based application like Pages, Save and Print are common commands in the File menu that feature an ellipsis. When you choose Print…, the print dialog appears with all of the settings you can choose from before sending a job to a printer — or saving it as a PDF.

The Save command has two states:

  1. If a document has never been saved, the command features an ellipsis, because the next step is to choose where to save the file and what to call it.
  2. After this initial operation, the Save command loses its ellipsis because subsequent saves are instantaneous with changes overwriting the previous version.

Add Bookmark…

In web browsers, the Bookmarks menu includes commands to Show Bookmarks and/or Edit Bookmarks as well as to Add Bookmark… or Bookmark This Tab…. The former commands have no ellipses because they instantly display the bookmark organizer, where you can arrange bookmarks in a desired order and categorize them in folders.

The latter commands have ellipses because they reveal a simple dialog, like that of Save, in which you specify a name and location to store the bookmark for future access.

Customize Toolbar…

Some applications, like the Finder and Mail, include a toolbar at the top of the window that you can customize. Toolbars contain buttons that perform various actions. These actions are often mirrored by menu commands.

You’ll find the Customize Toolbar… command in the View menu — usually near the top or the bottom. You may be enthralled at the wealth of customization possible in these apps.

When the toolbar customizer sheet drops down, the toolbar buttons will start jiggling. Feel free to drag them around or remove them from the bar and add others from the array of choices. You can even play with space, including empty squares and flexible space.

Don’t worry about screwing up because you can always revert to the default toolbar by dragging it from the bottom of the customizer up to the toolbar.

In Mail, say you want the full search field always present in the toolbar so you don’t have to always click the magnifying glass. Do you make use of the Move menu, which takes up a significant space in the default toolbar? If you remove this, Search might fit just the way you want it.

Bonus: Keyboard Shortcuts with Ellipsis

If you want to make a keyboard shortcut for a menu command that contains an ellipsis, you must type the ellipsis next to the command name. This is not simply three periods. In fact, it is a special character that you can type by pressing Option+Semicolon.

Learn more in Command Day….

There’s so much value in the design work Apple has done to ensure you can use various applications on a Mac in a consistent and predictable fashion. The ellipsis is but one of many nuances of the Mac that makes it easy to use — once you understand the underlying meaning.