Commands at your fingertips

While we value touch-scrolling Magic Mice and gesturesensing Magic Trackpads, the 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 same mists as St George’s, there’s a 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 you need without having to point a little arrow at them.

1 Keep tab 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 [spacebar] 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, tick ‘Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls’ (previously Full Keyboard Access).