Ok, so I thought that most of us could grasp shortcuts, but, I was mistaken. Apparently there’s a whole slew of people out there that have no damn clue what all those shortcut icons mean in the application menus. So, for those of you daft enough (you know who you are) to just use your mouse to click through menus, here’s a quick explanation. I have listed them first, as a reference:
⌘, command
⌥, option
⌃, control
⇧ , shift
So, usually we see these shortcut characters in the menus around os x, in conjunction with a letter, a number, or even a couple others of the aformentioned characters. Probably the most important one to note of the above characters is the “command” or “⌘” character. It’s the same as control on that other piece of crap operating system. So, if you could handle the control key there, you should be able to handle the command key here… right?
So, lets try one.
Hit: ⌘ N, at the same time… not ⌘ then N… this should open up a new window for you.
Hit: ⌘ T, if you’re using Firefox or Safari… you should get a new tab.
Now lets try a tricky one, can you handle it? Probably not… but here’s to hoping!
Hit: ⌘ + ⌥ + Esc , that plus means also…not the plus key. Hey look, it’s like hitting “control+alt+delete”.
I could go on for hours about keyboard shortcuts here, but hopefully you’ve gotten the hang of it by now. A good place to look for keyboard shortcuts is in the ‘system preference –>keyboard & mouse –>keyboard short cuts’. You can find what certain key combos do, and make new ones in this section of the system preferences. Feel free to experiment with them, just don’t go screwing crap up!
