Maria’s Guides

A list of shortcut keys you can use in most Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard dialogs.

This is the first in a series of quick articles that list shortcut keys available in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. In this piece, I’ll tell you about some of the shortcuts you can use in Mac OS X dialogs.

Tab

The Tab key advances you to the next area of a dialog. So, if a dialog contains multiple text boxes for entering information, tab moves you from one to the next. You can tell when an item in a dialog is active because a blue border appears around it or a blue (usually) selection bar appears within it (or both, depending on the item).

In this example of the Open dialog for Apple’s Pages application, the Search box is active; you can see the blue border around it. If any of the list items were active, they’d have a blue bar on the selected item.

Return or Enter

Pressing return or Enter “clicks” the default button in the dialog. The default button is blue and pulsating — it stands out from other buttons in the dialog.

Not all dialogs have a default button and, in many cases, the default button isn’t the one you’d expect it to be. For example, when I select a podcast and press the Delete key in iTunes, I’d expect the Move to Trash button to be the default. It isn’t, as shown here. The Keep Files button is the default. Pressing return removes the file from iTunes, but who knows where it is or goes on disk?

Keep in mind that although these shortcut keys should work in the Finder, they may not work in all Mac OS X applications. It really depends on the software developer’s implementation of Mac OS standards. Try them and see for yourself!

Letter or Command-letter

This one is kind of tricky and doesn’t work all of the time. But I’ve found that it works in many applications.

If you have a dialog with multiple buttons, you can “click” one of the buttons by pressing the letter key corresponding to the first character in the button name. So in the dialog shown above, you can choose Move to Trash by pressing M.

In some applications, you might have to hold down the Command key while pressing the letter key.

You can also use a letter key to quickly go to the first item starting with that letter in a selected scrolling list.

Escape or Command-. (period)

Pressing Escape or Command-. is the same as clicking the cancel or close button in a dialog. At least it should work that way.

Up Arrow and Down Arrow

Pressing one of these arrow keys highlights the previous or next item in a selected scrolling list.

Left and Right Arrow

Pressing one of these arrow keys enables you to move horizontally in a multiple-column list. For example, in the first screenshot here, if the first column was active, you could use the right arrow key to activate the second column.

Page Up and Page Down

Pressing one of the Page keys scrolls a selected list one windowful at a time.

Command-Shift-G

You like the Go To Folder dialog that you can use in the Finder? Well, you can also use it in an Open or Save As dialog. Just press Command-Shift-G while the dialog is open. You can then enter a path to the folder you want

I have a mental block when it comes to that dialog and never seem to enter the right path on the first try.

Page References

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide includes more information about these topics:

• Keyboard shortcuts, page 23.
• Dialogs, pages 207-209
• Go To Folder Command and Dialog, pages 52-53