How well do you know your macOS keyboard shortcuts?

A little bit of history

The Command key symbol, also known as the “looped square”, “Saint John’s Arms”, “Bowen knot”, “clover”, or “propeller” symbol, first appeared on the keyboard & in the menus of the original Macintosh (1984).

It replaced the use of the Apple logo () on the Apple keys that were present on the keyboards for the Apple IIe, Apple III, and the Lisa.  Unlike its predecessors, the Macintosh would show the keyboard shortcuts for menu commands in the menus themselves, using symbols for modifier keys like Command.  Since the symbol would be displayed many times all over the menus, Steve Jobs felt use of the Apple logo would be dilute its value.  He tasked Susan Kare, principal & beloved visual designer for the original Macintosh, to come up with a new symbol.  She found the iconic symbol after pouring through book collections of symbols, looking for something ‘abstract’.  It had previously been used very little, mainly just as a ‘place of interest’ indicator on maps in some Nordic countries.

In Unicode it is formally still the “Place of interest sign”, even though most of the world now knows it as the Command key symbol.

The Apple logo persisted alongside ⌘ on the key until 2007!

See its origin for yourself in Macintosh System 1.0!

A [very] little bit of history

The Option key replaced the Closed Apple key () from pre-Macintosh Apple computers, for the same reason that the Open Apple key was replaced with the Command key – to reduce repetition of the Apple logo in the Mac GUI.

It seems to be unknown or at least undocumented as to how the symbol was chosen.

A little history

The use of a caret (also known as a chevron or circumflex) to symbolise the Control key appears to date back to at least the PDP-6 era (1963), where an upwards-pointing arrow was used.  That symbol was part of the very first ASCII standard (ASA standard X3.4-1963) as 0x5E, but a few years later that character was changed to the now-familiar caret (I believe in X3.4-1967, although the closest I can find an actual copy of is X3.4-1968).  You can read the full history of ASCII, if you’re interested.

Fun fact:  Apple’s very first operating system technical note, OS01, was to call out the existence of command-shift-N shortcuts, including ⇧⌘3.

⇧⌘4 also existed from the beginning, although its original behaviour was to print the active window (or the whole screen if Caps Lock was enabled), rather than save to a file!

Tip: ⇧⌘⇥ cycles in the opposite direction, i.e. least recently used application first.

Pro tip: you can release the ⇥ key while still holding ⌘ to keep the application switcher on screen.  You can then hit ⇥ or ⇧⇥ successive times to move through the applications at your own pace.  Or interact with them via the mouse (including dropping things onto them, such as files to open).

In some applications you can also just type three periods followed by a space, and auto-replacement will turn the three periods into an actual ellipsis.  But this is not reliable across applications, even amongst native Mac apps.

Tip: you can use ⇧⌘` to cycle through the windows in the reverse order.

Tip: Apple build in a large number of translating dictionaries, e.g. for Spanish to English.  They provide translations and definitions in your native language.  You can enable them in the Settings for the Dictionary app.

Pro tip: Apple include a special dictionary of proper nouns for Apple products, such as macOS releases.  Helpful if you can’t remember the name of the operating system you were running just last year. 😜

Tip: in non-native applications which get this wrong, an alternative shortcut that they sometimes get right is ⌘↑.

Strictly-speaking this doesn’t record only a video – it brings up a palette which lets you choose between stills & video, among other configuration options.

This feature was introduced relatively recently, in macOS 10.14 Mojave (2018), as part of the addition of the Screenshot app to macOS.

Tip: similar to ⇧⌘4, ⇧⌘5 lets you choose a specific region of the screen.  However, unlike ⇧⌘4, your chosen region persists across invocations – making it trivial to capture the exact same region of your screen repeatedly.  Very convenient for marketing shots (e.g. light vs dark mode versions).

Option-arrows, the various modifications thereof, are handy text editing utilities.  For completeness:

⌥← / ⌥→ move the cursor to the start or end (respectively) of the word (in the given direction), jumping word-by-word as necessary.

⌥↑ / ⌥↓ move the cursor to the start or end (respectively) of the paragraph (in the given direction), jumping paragraph-by-paragraph as necessary.

⌘← / ⌘→ move the cursor to the start or end (respectively) of the current line (the equivalent of Home and End on some other platforms).

All of these can be combined with ⇧ to select text as the cursor moves.

Many a Mac newbie has accidentally rotated their images when they merely meant to rename them. 😕

Sidenote

Introduced in System 7, aliases are the Mac version of a Unix symlink or Windows shortcut.  They are still nominally supported to this day in macOS, although many applications – even otherwise well-written, native ones – do not handle them correctly.  Most Unix applications, such as almost everything you find through Terminal, will not resolve aliases to their targets, even when those same programs work correctly with symlinks and hardlinks.  Not because they explicitly support those either, but because in macOS aliases are not automatically resolved by the Unix file system APIs, and curious and unfortunate design choice on Apple’s part.

As a result, aliases were forced out of typical use by Mac OS X.  Today they are rare in the wild.

Which is a shame, because they were technically far superior to symlinks.  Rather than merely storing a brittle path, as symlinks do, they stored a detailed and partially-redundant set of identifiers, making them maintain their link even if the original is moved or renamed, for example.  Unfortunately, Apple broke this behaviour as of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, further cementing the demise of the alias.

Tip: make sure to explore its Settings (the ⋯⃝ pop-up menu button in the top-left corner) to see the full range of available character categories.  By default only a small handful are enabled.

Note: on some Macs, Fn-E also works.  It is not listed here because it is not the canonical shortcut, only works on some Macs (those that have a Fn key), and only since about macOS Big Sur.  It also has a habitat of not working reliably even on Macs which meet both those criteria.

Meta-trivia: in an earlier version of this quiz, Fn-E was actually listed as an option, but not accepted – whoops!  The quiz has since been corrected to not list it as an option, to avoid confusion.  Of the options given (and on many Macs) ⌃⌘Space is the only correct answer.

Tip: lots of input validation code is very badly written, especially in websites (as opposed to e.g. native apps).  You can often get around “no spaces” restrictions with the non-breaking space character.