Cheat Sheet Application
One of the nice things about the Macintosh applications is that developers will assign keyboard shortcuts to common applications. After performing certain actions, you begin to learn that using the short cuts is a quick way to get things done.
After a while you begin to learn some of the fundamental shortcuts that are in most applications:
| ⌘ | q | Quit Application |
| ⌘ | w | Close Application Window |
| ⌘ | , | Application Preferences |
| ⌘ | f | Find |
| ⌘ | c | Copy |
| ⌘ | v | Paste |
Apple has a macOS Human Interface Guideline that has specific recommended keyboard shortcuts that developers should use.
Application Shortcut Help
Learning application specific shortcuts can be tricky. One way is to pull down every menu and see what shortcuts are available. Some applications do list the menu and command shortcuts in their help section.
A really cool way is to use Cheat Sheet by Media Atelier. Here's how they describe how CheatSheet works:
Once installed, go into any application and hold the ⌘ key for a couple of seconds and a Window will pop up to show all the Menu shortcuts that are available:
CheatCheat view of BBEdit Shortcuts.
Once you let go of the ⌘ key the window goes away.
Note that this only shows Menu based tips. Some applications will have hotkeys, for example, Pixelmator has hotkeys to select various tools in the toolbar. For those you'll have to access the application specific help pages.
CheatSheet Tip
Did you know that you could print out the tips?
On the bottom of the CheatSheet window is a Cog icon, click on it and you'll see a Print option. You can print out a copy, or create a PDF cheatsheet.
Additional Shortcut Reference
There are tons of cool keyboard shortcut guides, these are very useful to print out and keep by your computer. Spending a few minutes learning the various keys can save you lots of time when your working on a project.
Here are some very cool Shortcut Guides that I have found.
- Chrome Browser - Google has an extensive list of all the various keyboard shortcuts.
- Pixelmator - Good PDF of all the possible keyboard shortcuts.
- Affinity Designer - Cool reference layout from the company that makes Affinity Designer.