15 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts For Beginners: Cheat Sheet

A chicken vs. egg question: Has the steady modernization of the Mac OS, with its glorious graphics and intuitive interface caused us to forget Mac keyboard shortcuts or to never learn them in the first place? If you ask, any old dude will regale you with tales of knowing mac keyboard shortcuts to the point that they considered a mouse superfluous. This is pre-track pad, of course. Many of these old dudes toiled away on desktops before things became remotely portable. Dark Ages always precede the Renaissance. If you really dig into history, keyboard shortcuts predate Apple.

Let’s face it; even though that glorious trackpad is barely a thumb’s length away (on a Macbook; the mouse is an even further elbow’s bend for the desktop set), it still requires both that thumb stretch and glancing at the screen to aim your cursor. That is an eternity when you are in the flow zone.

Of course, many programs/apps have their proprietary mac keyboard shortcut combos. Final Cut Pro has so many that several vendors sell keyboard overlays to help you cheat rather than recall. However, here we want to explore just those mac keyboard shortcuts native to the Mac OS, so that they are available within any application you happen to be dealing with.

How Are Mac Keyboard Shortcuts Helpful?

In short, it is about efficiency. But it is also about placing hidden functionality at your fingertips. Consider what is arguably the single most useful of the mac keyboard shortcuts: Undo.

Wait, maybe you really liked that last thing you did. How about Redo?

Here's another trio of mac keyboard shortcuts that many people are familiar with:

These functions, in combination with a quick track pad/mouse cursor repositioning, allow you to move text around faster than you ever thought possible. (Okay, you had to look at the screen. Does that really harm our argument?)

Is There a Need for Mac Keyboard Shortcuts?

This may seem like an odd question, but Apple has answered it definitively by continuing the include four mac keyboard shortcuts keys on its products. If you look to the bottom left of your keyboard, you will see:

Even some of the earliest Macs had these keys to provide additional functionality. But Apple is not a company to dwell on nostalgia. Consider the fact that they were the first to eliminate floppy disk drives, CD-ROM drives, and even headphone jacks as they further refined their machines. Even in this drive to dispense with the unnecessary, they held onto the keyboard shortcut keys. This remains true even on the latest Macbook Pros with the muti-function magic touchpad above the keyboard. Apple really believes that mac keyboard shortcuts still do the job in the most efficient way possible.

Bonus Apple fact: The cloverleaf symbol that appears on the Command key was designed at Steve Job’s request during late-stage development of the original 1984 Macintosh. The key (and correlated on-screen menu selections) originally featured a tiny iconized version of the Apple logo. However, Jobs felt this was overuse of the logo, which appeared elsewhere in the machine’s design.

This key has also differentiated Mac keyboards from other personal computer manufacturers. In a 2007 Mac keyboard redesign, space was created to include the word “Command” on the key so that it matched the other three mac keyboard shortcuts keys.

Most Useful Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

Considering the usefulness of just these five commonly-known shortcut functions (Undo, Redo, Copy, Cut, and Paste), we thought we would dig a little to provide the next ten mac keyboard shortcuts that could change your relationship with the machine. The list was going so well, we had a hard time narrowing it to just ten, so here are 15 of the most useful mac keyboard shortcuts.

Conclusion

We joke about the old dudes who know all the mac keyboard shortcuts, but the truth is you could learn a lot from an old dude. There’s a reason they call them wise old dudes. Taking note of the fact that Apple still includes the four function keys on their machines, we can dispense with the chicken vs. egg question we opened with to realize that it doesn’t matter why mac keyboard shortcuts aren’t as used as they once were. What really matters is that knowing even just this short list of shortcuts makes you a power user. That makes you more efficient and keeps you where you wanted to be in the first place: In your flow.