Today I had another opportunity to take advantage of one of my favorite Leopard tips, but interestingly enough, it’s one that isn’t very well known out there. You may have heard of this tip, you may have not, but I thought that it might be interesting on this Fourth of July to take a break from my usual string of blog posts to share this tip from Mac OS X Leopard.

Have you ever used an application that had a menu item that you said, “Boy, why didn’t the developer think to give that menu item a keyboard shortcut?” I sure have. For example, in the new Safari 3, I use that “Merge All Windows” feature from the Window menu quite frequently, but it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut at all. Well, Leopard gives you a way to assign keyboard shortcuts easily.

Open System Preferences and go to Keyboard & Mouse, then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Not only does this tab let you see the various system-wide keyboard shortcuts available to you, including some you may not have known about (did you know that you could show the Help menu with Shift-Command-/ by default or look things up with Control-Command-D by default?). To add a new shortcut, however, just click on the + button underneath the list, which will bring down a new sheet. If you’re adding a shortcut for a menu item in a specific application, choose it in the pop-up menu. If you’re adding a shortcut for a system-wide menu item, like a service or an Apple menu item or something like that, leave it to All Applications. In the box that says “Menu Title,” enter the exact name of the menu item you’re editing. Capitalization counts here, and if the menu item includes an ellipsis (…) at the end, include that as well. Don’t worry about what menu or submenu the item is in. Finally, in the last box, enter the keyboard shortcut you want, being sure that it doesn’t duplicate an existing one in the application or in the system. Then, click Add, and restart the affected application.

If you entered it correctly, you’ll find that the menu item should now display its keyboard shortcut, and for most applications (definitely Cocoa applications), the shortcut will be functional. Incidentally, this trick also works in Mac OS X Tiger, except that the shortcut won’t display itself in the menu item. This doesn’t work everywhere (Firefox wouldn’t go with it), but in Safari, it’s sure a lot easier to merge all windows into tabs with a Shift-Command-M than it is to have to go into the Window menu manually.

Tags: keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, Leopard, Mac, Mac OS X, menu items, menus, tip