An Apple shortcut list: the ones worth keeping

Search for an Apple shortcut list and the results are exhaustive. Apple's own reference runs to tens of thousands of words, and several third-party cheat sheets are longer still. Completeness is not the problem. Retention is. A list of four hundred combinations produces the same outcome as no list at all, because nothing in it gets used twice.

There is also an ambiguity in the phrase itself. On an Apple platform, "shortcut" means two different things: a key combination, and an automation built in the Shortcuts app. Both have lists. Both are worth having. They are not the same subject, and a page that mixes them without saying so wastes the reader's time.

Read the symbols first

Apple's reference writes combinations in prose and in symbols, and menus use symbols only. Six of them cover everything:

• Fn (Function) or Globe
• Control, written as ⌃
• Option, or Alt, written as ⌥
• Shift, written as ⇧
• Caps Lock, written as ⇪
• Command, or Cmd, written as ⌘

That is why the right edge of any macOS menu is itself a shortcut list. Opening the File or Edit menu of any application and reading down the right side is faster than searching for a list online, because it shows only the shortcuts that exist in the application currently in front. Apple's own guidance says as much: every app contains its own shortcuts, and they are visible next to each menu command.

Anyone who learns the six symbols stops needing a reference for anything an application already provides. The list below is for the combinations that no menu displays.

The dozen that carry the rest

Combination	What it does
Command-Space bar	Open Spotlight to search the Mac and the web
Command-Tab	Switch between open apps, held down to cycle
Command-Grave accent	Switch between windows of the same app
Command-W	Close the current window or tab
Command-Q	Quit the current app
Command-Z	Undo, with Shift-Command-Z to redo
Option-Command-Esc	Force quit
Control-Command-Q	Lock the screen
Control-Up Arrow	Mission Control
Command-Mission Control	Show the desktop, also Fn-H or Fn-F11
Control-Command-Space bar	Emoji and character viewer, also Fn-E
Space bar	Quick Look the selected file

The pairing worth singling out is Command-Tab and Command-Grave accent. The first moves between applications, the second between windows of the application already in front. Most people learn the first and not the second, then spend years using a mouse to reach a second window of the same app. On a machine running several browser windows or several documents, the second combination is used more often than the first.

Control-Command-Q deserves the same attention. Locking the screen is a two second action that most people perform by closing the lid, which suspends everything running. Apple notes that some of these power related combinations need to be held "for slightly longer than other shortcuts", which is deliberate: they are the ones that should not fire by accident.

Finding things again

Finder shortcuts are the quiet productivity layer, because file navigation is where minutes disappear without anyone noticing.

Shift-Command-N creates a new empty folder. Command-D duplicates the selection. Command-I shows the Get Info window for a selected file. Command-Delete moves the selection to the Trash. Command-K opens the Connect to Server window, which matters on any network with a shared volume.

Three go further than they look. Shift-Command-G opens a Go to Folder window, which accepts a typed path and is the fastest route to anything nested. Option-Command-L opens the Downloads folder, which is where every browser export lands and where most "the file vanished" reports end. Shift-Command-U opens the Utilities folder, home to Disk Utility, Terminal, Activity Monitor and Console.

Shift-Command-R opens the AirDrop window, documented by Apple as the way to send items to nearby devices. That places it correctly: excellent for a handful of files passed between two Macs in the same room, and the wrong tool for moving a whole account.

Moving through text without the mouse

Text editing combinations produce the largest return per key learned, because they apply in nearly every application.

Option-Left Arrow moves to the start of the previous word and Option-Right Arrow to the end of the next word. Command-Left Arrow goes to the start of the current line and Command-Right Arrow to the end. Option-Delete deletes the word to the left rather than a single character.

Holding Shift with any of those selects instead of moving, which is the part that is rarely spelled out. Shift-Option-Right Arrow selects the next word. Shift-Command-Left Arrow selects to the start of the line. That single rule, adding Shift to turn movement into selection, replaces roughly a dozen separate entries in an exhaustive list and is easier to remember than any of them.

Command-C, Command-V, Command-X, Command-A and Command-S need no explanation, but Shift-Command-Z for redo does, because it is the one people look up repeatedly rather than learning once.

Two habits make the text set pay off faster. The first is using Option and Command with the arrow keys instead of holding down a plain arrow key, since word and line jumps land precisely where a repeated keypress overshoots. The second is noticing where these combinations stop applying: a terminal, a code editor with its own key map, and some web based editors each rebind part of the set, so a combination that works in a document may move the cursor somewhere else entirely in a browser tab. That inconsistency is not a fault in the list. It is the application in front asserting its own map.

Screenshots and screen recording

Shift-Command-3 captures the full screen and Shift-Command-4 captures a selected area. Shift-Command-5 opens the Screenshot app, which Apple documents as available in macOS Mojave or later, and which handles both stills and video.

The Screenshot toolbar offers Record Entire Screen, Record Selected Portion, and, in macOS Tahoe 26 or later, Record Selected Window. Its Options menu covers choosing a microphone, including system audio in macOS 27 Golden Gate or later, showing mouse clicks, setting a timer, and changing the save location, which defaults to the desktop. Recording stops with Command-Control-Esc, and pressing Esc before clicking Record cancels the capture.

QuickTime Player remains the alternative: Control-Command-N starts a New Screen Recording from its File menu. For file previews rather than captures, Command-Y opens Quick Look for selected files and Option-Command-Y opens them as a slideshow.

The other kind of shortcut

The Shortcuts app is where the word means an automation rather than a key. Its list is a list of workflows, and the parts most worth knowing are the ones that connect it to everything else.

Shortcuts can appear as Quick Actions in the Finder and Services menu, or pinned to the menu bar. Both of those are generated folders rather than folders created by hand, which matters when scripting against them.

The command line interface is documented and stable. A shortcut runs with shortcuts run "Combine Images", or with an escaped space as shortcuts run Combine\ Images. Files are passed in with -i or --input-path and written out with -o or --output-path, and the output type can be forced with --output-type followed by a Uniform Type Indicator. Available shortcuts are listed with shortcuts list, folders with shortcuts list --folders, and one custom folder with shortcuts list -f Music. Apple's documentation notes that -f works only with custom folders and not with generated ones such as Quick Actions or Menu Bar, and that the command "will exit 0 on a successful run or 1 on error". That exit code is what makes a shortcut safe to call from a larger script.

Scripting inside a shortcut is off by default. Apple's instruction is to "Choose Shortcuts > Settings", then "Select Allow Running Scripts in the Advanced tab", with an explicit warning that running shortcuts with scripts could cause data loss.

Making one stick

A shortcut list is worth nothing until a combination fires without conscious thought, and that transition takes about a week per shortcut if it is approached deliberately. The method that works is narrow: pick one, use only it for seven days, and refuse the mouse for that specific action even when the mouse is faster in the moment.

Picking well matters more than practising hard. The candidates worth the week are the actions performed many times a day, not the impressive ones. Opening a folder by typing its path is worth learning. Force quitting is not, because it happens rarely enough that looking it up costs nothing.

There is a second reason to go one at a time. Learning five combinations in a day produces five half-memories that collide, and the collision shows up as hesitation, which is slower than the mouse was. Learning one produces one reflex. Five weeks of that is five reflexes, which is roughly the whole useful set for most people.

The final habit is subtraction. Any combination that has not been used in a month should be dropped from the list rather than kept for completeness. A list that only holds shortcuts in active use stays short enough to read, and a short list gets read.

Adding your own, and why long lists fail

Any menu item in any application can be given a key combination, whether or not the developer supplied one. Apple's route is System Settings, then Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts, then App Shortcuts, then Add, entering the menu item name and the combination. The name has to match the menu exactly, which is the usual reason a new binding silently does nothing.

This is where exhaustive lists become a liability. Every custom binding competes with the application in front, and the application in front wins. A combination assigned globally may work in the Finder and fail in a browser, because the browser claimed it first. In a browser holding many web applications, the competition is worse again: Command-K opens a command palette in one service, inserts a link in a second and jumps to a channel in a third, so the same keystroke means three things depending on which tab has focus.

Reducing that collision is a layout question rather than a keyboard question. When each service sits in its own window, as it does in an app aggregation browser, the application in front is the only one competing for the key, and a binding behaves the same way every time it is pressed. Where the same service is used under several identities, giving each one its own workspace keeps the behaviour predictable per window instead of per tab. Anyone driving automations from a terminal will find the command line route more reliable still, since shortcuts run sidesteps keystroke competition entirely.

What to change first

Learn the six modifier symbols, then commit Command-Grave accent and Shift-Command-G to memory, since those two replace the largest amount of mouse work. Add Shift to any movement combination to select rather than move, and stop consulting lists for anything a menu already displays. If bindings behave differently from one browser tab to the next, the fix is window layout rather than more keys, which is what SpaceDeck is built around.