The Mac Lawyer Using Macs in Law Firms | Attorney Ben Stevens

Guest Post :: Three Awesome Time-Saving Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

By J. Benjamin Stevens on Posted in Guest Posts, How Do I ... ?, Mac OS X

The following guest post is from Kenji Crosland, a writer for TeachStreet, a website that provides online and local classes including law classes and mac classes:

If you want to get your Mac black belt, you’ve got to learn your keyboard shortcuts. Knowing how to use CMD + C, V, X, and sometimes Y is a good start, but when you want to graduate to the big leagues you might want to get acquainted with the shortcuts here:

1.  Quick Screenshots :: If you ever need to explain a computer procedure to someone else, making screenshots are a necessity. Macs are pretty cool in that you can use a keyboard shortcut to actually select the area of the screen that you want to save as an image. This saves you all the time it would take to crop the image in an image editor later. All you have to do is type in CMD + SHIFT + 4 and a marquee tool will appear right on the tool to appear on the screen like so:

2.  Save some characters on Twitter :: You really want to put an ellipsis on your Twitter update, but you’ve ran out of room. The keyboard shortcut (OPTION + ;) will make the ellipsis appear as just one character. Very handy for when you’re running out of room!

3.  Instant word suggestion + dictionary :: If you hit the F5 key in a text editor (when writing an email or blog post like this one), you’ll get suggestions for the word you’re trying to write. Like so:

And CMD + CTRL + D will look up the highlighted word in the system-wide dictionary app. What about you, what are your favorite mac keyboard shortcuts?  Let us know in the Comments below…

Note: The awesome photo you see us taking a screenshot of above is by pardeshi.

  • Walter DeFoor

    Another amazing shortcut that is Mac only is Option+6 which gives the lovely lovely §. Opt+J is ∆ and Opt+P is π for quick note taking in law school.

  • Curt Rees

    CMD + spacebar is my favorite shortcut. This opens up the search box and helps you track down apps and documents very quickly. No more clicking to figure out which folder you stored that doc in.

  • http://www.ivanexpert.com Caroline Green

    My favorite shortcut is the Command-Tab to scroll through open apps. Great for switching between Safari and my mail program quickly.

  • Casey

    Where does the screenshot go? To the clipboard? Or is it automatically saved to a file?

  • http://blog.teachstreet.com Kenji Crosland

    @Casey – It usually goes to a file, although you can specify it so that it can go to a clipboard.

  • Julie Kiernan

    Command+i to get info. I use to find size of disk, volume etc. I use all the others a lot too.

  • Stan Kramer

    CMD + OPT + SHIFT + 4 will save the selected screenshot to memory.

  • http://wiredlawyer.com Nick Hamze

    If you are a fan of shortcuts (which you should be) you should check out Alfred (www.alfredapp.com). Alfred is a free productivity app that lets you make shortcuts out of anything. It is really handy, I use it everyday.

  • http://www.trialtechview.com Blake Boyd

    Agreed with Curt that commented above. CMD + Space Bar to open spotlight is incredible. I never open programs from a link because it’s much slower to take my hands off of the keyboard.
    Just cmd+space and start typing the program name and press enter.