Silvermac

Great tip. I never knew how to do that on my Mac.

GREAT!
It’s so helpful.

Sometimes we do not look for shortcuts … but it’s so fast!

I thought it might be important for some of your readers to know about setting the correct System Preferences to make this tip work…

You must go to the Apple menu and select System Preferences. Then select Keyboard & Mouse. Select the Keyboard tab. From here be sure that the “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” check box is checked.

To use the F-keys to control hardware features such as Volume or Brightness use the fn (Function) key instead of the ctrl (Control) key.

If the “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” check box is not checked in the Keyboard & Mouse System preference, this tip will not work as described.

Happy Mac-ing!

PS I’ve come to love Silver Mac’s new face lift. It scrolls like butter!

and Ctrl-F3 select the dock. btw, there is an app called deja menu that lets you access the menus by means of keyboard shortcuts you define.

Perfect. Fantastic. I was just wondering about that on my third convert day.

Note also that you can type the name of the menu item you want to go to to get to that quicker than just arrow keys. Makes little difference in practice, but vaguely useful.

Hey I may just be pressing the wrong keys but all that shows up is the brightness controller on my screen….

I am using 10.4.9. Don’t really know if that has anything to do with it!

Thanks!

This trick is great. On my Mac, a PowerPC G4 with MacOs 10.4.9,
1) it works when :
a) pressing only Control-F2 (2 keys) with the check box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” checked.
b) pressing Control-fn-F2 (3 keys) with the check box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” not checked.
2) it doesn’t works when :
a) pressing only Control-F2 (2 keys) with the check box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” not checked.
b) pressing Control-fn-F2 (3 keys) with the check box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” checked.

So checking this checking box is antagonist with pressing the fn key. Confirmation :
Pressing Control-F1 makes the use of Control-F2 unavaliable, pressing it again restores it, and the fn keys acts in the same way.

Question : except for Control-F3 who knows the actions of Control-F4, Control-F5, and the others Control-Fs ?

Candace said: Hey I may just be pressing the wrong keys but all that shows up is the brightness controller on my screen….

Candace, check out either my June 11th post or Jacques’ June 15th post. Either of these will help you…

Forget Ctrl+F2. Forget the dock. Forget your mouse (most of the time).

Quicksilver gives users much faster access (think typing partial keywords rather than arrowing through menus) to the menu items of *all* active programs.

So I’m in iViewMedia Pro and I want to sort all of my photos by capture date. I’ve bound a trigger to invoke Quicksilver and select the menu items for the current application, so all I do is hit opt+space, type ‘ca’ (that’s all it needs to isolate ‘capture date’) and hit enter. Done. No mouse, no arrows, no time wasted.

If you like time-saving keyboard shortcuts and haven’t heard of quicksilver, I highly recommend you check it out. It has changed the way I use my mac.

http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

The problem for quickness is that on OSX you cannot navigate menus with single unique letters, as you can in Window, and windows gives one screen hints on how to do it as you go. I’d be endlessly grateful if anyone could point me to a way of using a Mac like you can use Windows in this way. In my opinion it is a big problem with OSX.

Actually, after you initiate Control+F2 you can navigate menus using the first letter of each menu item [If it isn't the first letter, then that could mean it has already been assigned to another menu item]. The clues are not there, but, the navigation is possible. You just have to get used to it as it is a bit different on OSX than it is in Windows. Depending what app you’re in, Cntl+F2, then type the first letter of each word. You can then hit down arrow down, then see what letters will activate each menu item. Often times, it is either the Command letter, in other instances where there is no command letter, it could be the first letter you see for each word. As it highlights what you want, you then hit return. But, most Mac users will memorize most command keys that get the app to do specific things that a person will receptively use. Which is not unlike what Windows can do as well, only no command key and very limited use of the Windows key.