Commands at your fingertips

While we value our touch–scrolling Magic Mice and gesture–sensing Magic Trackpads, the frankly not–particularly Magic Keyboard is often the fastest way to activate commands. Even as the Mac’s legendary role as cursor–armed slayer of the green–screen command line slips into the mists of time, there’s still a little bit of an aversion, chez Cupertino, to keyboard navigation. But if you know your way around, with a few tweaks you can invoke many of the commands that you need without having to point a little arrow at them.

1 KEEP TABS WITH TAB

You probably use Tab to move between text fields. You may know you can use it to switch the blue outline between buttons in a dialog box, then press Space to click (Return selects the solid blue button regardless). You may have noticed pressing Tab in the Finder highlights the next file in alphabetical order, even if they’re not shown in that order. Witchcraft! But it can do more.

In System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, select “Use keyboard navigation” to move focus between controls (previously Full