7 Handy Shortcuts for Mac Most People Have Never Seen Before

Use Text Clippings

Do you have a section of text that you are tired of copying and pasting over and over again in specific forms or letters? macOS has a way to make this easier.

1. Highlight the particular text that you are repeatedly using.
2. Click and hold somewhere highlighted that's not a letter, then use your mouse to drag it to your desktop and drop it there.
3. That will create a quick file with that portion of the text in it.
4. Now, when you have a field that you want to copy that text into, just drag the file from the desktop to that field, and it should automatically paste that text.

This leaves you free to use your clipboard for other purposes.

Command + Space for Spotlight

Pressing the Command and Space keys at the same time on your keyboard opens up Spotlight, which is your general solutions-finder on macOS.

If you’ve ever used Cortana on Windows 10, it works a lot like that. You can type in whatever you want – it could be a file name, a location, a currency conversion, a quick math problem, the time in Hong Kong, an app you want to find – you get the idea.

It’s your go-to solution for finding things out, and it’s usually quite a bit faster than trying to Google something on your own.

Command + Comma for Settings

Pressing the Command and Comma keys at the same time takes a little getting used to, but it’s a great little shortcut that goes right to the settings or preferences for whatever you are using.

If you want to tweak security, switch to a different mode, update your Preferences with new shortcuts, or make any other changes to the way your app works, just use this command.

Accenting Any Letter You Need

Tired of trying to manage accents for various words? This can get aggravating if you deal with a lot of accented vowels, etc. in your line of work, and not everyone has the time to make or download an add-on for it. On macOS, there’s an easier way. Just press and hold down a letter key, and a little menu of all its variants, accents included, will appear. This doesn’t work with all keys (mostly just the vowels) but it’s still a big timesaver.

Hot Corners

Hot Corners aren’t for everyone, but if you have a few go-to apps or commands that you are always launching, then they can be a big help. Head to System Preferences, Mission Control, and then Hot Corners at the bottom to set them up. Assign particular commands for each Hot Corner, and then you can activate these by swiping into that corner whenever you want. Hold down the Option key while assigning commands to make sure that the commands only activate with the Option key held down.

Command + Tab for App Switching

Press down
the Command and Tab keys at the same time. Then, with the Command key still
held down, you can tap the Tab key to rapidly switch between apps. It takes a
little getting used to, but it’s a great way to rapidly manage apps when you
have a lot of them open at the same time.

Command + Semicolon in Notes (and More) for Spellcheck

The Command and semicolon keys, together, will launch a spellchecker that will cycle you through every potentially misspelled word in a document every time you hit the semicolon button. If you don’t want to use add-ons like Grammarly or are reviewing a text where other spell check options aren’t available (or are annoying to use), then this command can still help you out!