Powerful Window Manager for Mac - split screen, move, resize, arrange windows with keyboard shortcuts, gestures, quickly resize and position your windows. 10 incredibly useful Mac keyboard shortcuts you should be using. (as sometimes happens when you hit the red “X” button at the top of any Mac app)—it completely shuts it down. When you press Control + Command + F it puts the current app in fullscreen. To take it out of fullscreen mode, just press those keys again. macOS: How to Empty the Mac Trash with a Keyboard Shortcut. The settings in some versions of the Mac operating system and some utility applications might conflict with keyboard shortcuts and function key operations in Office for Mac. For information about changing the key assignment of a keyboard shortcut, refer to the Mac Help for your version of the Mac operating system or refer to your utility. To switch between apps while in full-screen mode, you can use a three-finger swipe gesture on your Mac trackpad or use the Command + Tab shortcut keys. How to exit full-screen mode. Hover your cursor over the top left corner of the screen until you see the window bar. Then click the Exit full-screen button. It's red and looks like an X.
If you use a MacBook without an external display, full-screen mode is brilliant because it allows you to fill the whole screen with the app or document you’re working in, while making it easy to switch between different screens to move between apps or windows. The app you’re working in takes over the whole screen and both the Dock and the menu bar slide out of view — although to get them back all you have to do is move the pointer to the bottom or top of the screen.
Thanks to Apple’s clever implementation of features like Mission Control and gestures, using full screen mode is very easy. However, it definitely helps if you learn those gestures, along with the keyboard commands and other methods of using full screen mode on Mac. And, just as importantly, learn how to exit full screen mode.
How to turn on full screen mode
Even now, several years after it was introduced, not all apps fully support full screen mode. Often that’s because they have their own implementation of full-screen mode, or because they keep toolbars and palettes separate from document windows.
To find out if the app you’re working in supports full-screen mode, hover over the green button at the top left of the window. If it shows two arrows pointing outwards inside the green button, you can use it with full-screen mode. To switch it on, just click the green button.
You can also do one of the following to display a window in full-screen mode:
- Use the Mac’s full-screen keyboard shortcut: Control-Command-F; or
- Go to the View menu in the app you’re using and choose Enter Full-screen Mode.
How to exit full screen mode
There are two ways to exit full-screen mode:
- Press the Escape key. This works in most applications, but not all.
- Push the mouse pointer up to the top left of the screen until the three colored dots appear, then click on the green one.
In both cases, the window will shrink and sit onto Desktop, you can then re-size it as normal.
![Mac Apps Fullscreen Keystroke Mac Apps Fullscreen Keystroke](https://cdn.macpaw.com/uploads/images/Maintenance - run maintenance scripts.png)
How to minimize the screen
The method for minimizing a window on the screen hasn’t changed, you just click the yellow dot next to the green one. However, if you’re in full-screen mode, the yellow dot won’t be visible, so you’ll need to exit it first. To display a window after minimizing it, just find it in the Dock and click on it.
How to use full-screen mode with Mission Control
Mission Control allows you to have several desktop workspaces on your Mac and switch between them quickly. When you use full-screen mode with a document or application, it’s allocated its own workspace. If you press the Mission Control button (F3), you’ll see all the workspaces and full-screen apps you’re currently using. If you hover over one with the mouse pointer, you’ll see the name of the app or document appear below the thumbnail.
You can also invoke Mission Control by swiping upwards with three fingers on the trackpad. Once the full-screen apps and workspaces are in view along the top of the screen, you can drag the windows around to put them in the order you want them. That’s particularly useful if you use gestures to move between screens.
If you use multiple apps or documents in full-screen mode and need to swap between them, use the above method to place them next to each other. You can then swipe left and right with three fingers on the trackpad to move quickly between full-screen apps and documents.
Other ways to move between full-screen apps
You don’t have to use Mission Control if you prefer not too. You can switch screens by using the Application Switcher.
- Press Command+Tab to move to the next screen; or
- Press and hold Command+Tab then use the arrow keys to move right and left along the row of app icons.
You can also hold down the Control key and press the left or right arrow keys to move between full-screen apps.
When to use full-screen mode
Full-screen mode is particularly useful when you need to switch back and forth between apps quickly. For example, if you need to check numbers in a table in a Google doc against those in a spreadsheet in Numbers. Just put Safari and Numbers in full-screen mode, then use Mission Control to position the desktops next to each other so you can quickly swipe between them.
Putting apps in full-screen mode is also a great way of minimizing distractions. Many writing apps now have distraction-free modes and displaying them full screen allows you to get the most from that method of working.
When you’re editing photos and need the maximum screen space available, full-screen mode pushes the Dock and menu bar out of the way. Likewise, when you’re watching a video, full-screen mode enhances the experience.
![Capture Capture](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5gHQy.png)
What to do if full-screen mode gets stuck
First, try each of the three methods of reverting to normal mode: Command+Control+F; the green button; or the View menu. If none of those works, try quitting the app and then re-launching it. And if that doesn’t help, as a last resort, restart your Mac.
If you frequently run into problems with full-screen mode, one possible solution is to use maintenance scripts in CleanMyMac X. You can download it free here. Once you’ve installed and launched it, do the following:
- Click on Maintenance in the Utilities section.
- Check the boxes next to Run Maintenance Scripts and Repair Disk Permissions.
- Click Run.
That's it! By the way, with the help of CleanMyMac, you can easily optimize your Mac performance. The app will quickly scan your system and find all the junk that slows it down. All you have to do is to click Scan and then click Clean. Don't miss a chance to make your Mac as good as new in just 2 clicks!
Full-screen mode is a brilliant way of creating mode usable screen space on a Mac. If you use it together with Mission Control, it can feel almost like using multiple separate displays. It’s worth learning the keyboard shortcuts for both full-screen mode and Mission Control so you can use both quickly and effectively.
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I recently wrote an article about being productive on a small screen, which mentioned my belief that the most effective route to productivity on a computer is learning the available keyboard shortcuts.
In this piece, I’d like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts and related functionality that I use every day on the Mac.
Firstly, as I stated in the previous article, you should take the time to learn your text editing shortcuts. They’ll pay off every day. With that done, let’s get started.
Cheat sheet
Here’s a quick list of the primary keys involved in keyboard shortcuts on the Mac, for reference. If you’re reading this article on a desktop device, you can also hover your mouse over any keyboard shortcut to see it spelled out.
- ⌘ Command (Cmd) key
- ⌥ Option (Alt) key
- ⌃ Control (Ctrl) key
- ⇧ Shift key
- ⇪ Caps Lock
- Fn Function key
- F1 F1 key (and so on)
- ⇥ Tab key
- ↑ Up arrow
- ↓ Down arrow
- ← Left arrow
- → Right arrow
- ↩ Return key
- Space Space key/bar
- Esc Escape key
- Del Backspace/Delete key
Navigating the UI using the keyboard
Many people don’t realise that you can access and control much of the user interface without using a pointing device. You can find the relevant settings in the Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard panel in System Preferences. Make sure that Keyboard is selected in the list on the left side.
With the commands in that section, you can move the keyboard focus to various parts of the interface. One of my favourites is ⌃F2 to move focus to the menubar. Depending on the function keys setting in the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard panel, you might need to add Fn to any shortcut involving one of the function keys.
You can also switch between apps with ⌘⇥, and you can switch between the windows of an app with ⌘` (that’s the backtick key, which also has the ~ character on it). In both cases, you can add ⇧ to cycle through apps or windows in the opposite direction.
Finally, make sure you’ve enabled Full Keyboard Access in the Keyboard panel. When active, you can use the ⇥ key to move between most controls on the screen, not just text boxes and lists.
Searching the menubar
Mac apps tend to have lots of menu commands, and it can be difficult to remember where they all are. Instead, you can just type to search (and then trigger) a menu command, by pressing ⌘? (on English keyboards, that’s usually the same as ⌘⇧/).
When the results appear, use ↑↓ to select, and ↩ to activate.
Using Spotlight
Spotlight lets you quickly find and open any apps, files, emails and so forth on your Mac. You trigger it with ⌘Space.
When the results appear, use ↑↓ to select, and ↩ to activate.
You can also use ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ to jump between the sections (categories) in the list of results.
Finally, if you hold ⌘ when activating a result, it will be revealed in the Finder instead of being opened.
Iphone Keystroke App
Customising keyboard shortcuts in apps
Apps have their own keyboard shortcuts (mostly defined in their menubars), but you can change many of them to suit your own needs. To do so, again use the Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard panel, but this time select App Shortcuts in the list on the left side.
Create a category for the app whose shortcuts you want to override, then make an entry for each relevant menu command. Make sure you type the name of the menu command exactly as it appears in the app, including case-sensitivity and punctuation. In particular, note that an ellipsis (…) after a command name is a single character, not three periods. You can type an ellipsis with ⌥;.
Opening recent items
One of the things I do most often on the computer is opening recently-used files. Most apps keep track of their recent files in the Open Recent submenu of the File menu, but you can also get at them via the keyboard.
First, trigger the Application Switcher with ⌘⇥, and then keeping⌘held (so the Application Switcher remains visible, and has the relevant app highlighted), just press ↑.
You’ll see a display of all the app’s open documents, with a horizontal Cover Flow browser of recent files along the bottom.
You can select any item with ↑↓←→, and open it with ↩.
Working with Save sheets
Saving (or closing) an unsaved document invokes the familiar Save sheet, which can mostly be controlled via the keyboard.
Keystroke Tracker App
You can:
- Press Save with ↩
- Press Cancel with ⌘.
- Press Delete with ⌘Del
- Go to your Home folder with ⌘⇧H
- Go to your Desktop with ⌘D
- Go to any folder by pressing ⌘⇧G, then type the folder’s path. While typing the path, you can use ⇥ (or stop typing for a moment) to autocomplete folder names.
Full Keyboard Access will give you access to the rest of the Save sheet’s UI too.
Working with mailboxes in Mail
If you’re a Mail user (as in Apple’s own email app on OS X), you can easily add your favourite mailboxes to Mail’s toolbar, which gives you the considerable benefit of being able to open those mailboxes using keyboard shortcuts.
You can also move selected messages to those mailboxes using another set of shortcuts.
Don’t forget that you can customise Mail’s existing keyboard shortcuts as mentioned previously.
Using app-specific global hotkeys
Certain apps let you add global hotkeys to trigger them regardless of which app is frontmost at the time (though the app you’re triggering usually has to already be running at the time). For example, the official Twitter app on the Mac lets you choose global shortcuts to make a new tweet, and to toggle the app’s visibility.
Check each app’s own Preferences window to see if there are any shortcuts you can customise, and be sure to choose ones that won’t conflict with something else. Use as many modifier keys as possible to lessen the chance of any conflicts.
Looking up words
Whilst you’re typing, you can quickly look up the selected (or nearest) word in the system’s dictionary. The keyboard shortcut to do this is customisable (in the Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard panel again, this time in the Services section). On my Mac, it’s ⌘⌃D.
The definition will be shown in a pop-over window. You can choose which dictionaries are used by opening the Dictionary app, and visiting its Preferences window.
Customising how autocomplete works
Autocompletion can be helpful, and sometimes it can be the bane of your existence. You can tip the balance by adding your own useful text substitutions. It’s once again in the Keyboard panel, but this time in the Text tab.
That’s also where you can disable spelling correction, if you want to.
Typing special characters and emoji
There are many special characters and emoticons that you can type on OS X in almost any text field, usually via the Special Characters… menu command (often in the Edit menu). You can also trigger the palette with ⌘⌃Space.
Mac Apps Full Screen Keystroke Download
You don’t need to use the pointer at all when working with these characters. You can:
- Press ⇥ to switch sections.
- Use ↑↓←→ to choose a character in the current section.
- Press ↩ to insert the select character into the frontmost app.
- Just start typing to search for a character or symbol.
You can also tear the palette off and leave it floating around if you want to quickly click to insert multiple characters.
Zooming the screen
I often find it very helpful to temporarily enlarge sections of the screen, and OS X has a built-in function to do so. It’s in the Accessibility panel in System Preferences, in the Zoom section.
The most useful shortcuts here are:
- ⌘⌥8 to toggle zoom on or off.
- ⌘⌥= to zoom in (when zoom is already on).
- ⌘⌥- to zoom out (when zoom is already on).
You can control many aspects of how zoom works (whether it’s smoothed or jaggy, whether the whole screen zooms or uses picture-in-picture, and how zoom follows the mouse pointer) using the More Options… button.
Third party utilities
OS X itself can get you pretty far with keyboard control, but your productivity will take another leap with some well-chosen third party utilities. There are hundreds out there that focus on controlling your Mac using the keyboard, but I’ll just share three of the ones I use. Also see my aforementioned small screen productivity article for a few more.
Firstly, I use Alfred as my app launcher and file-finder, instead of Spotlight. It does about three thousand things, but one of the most useful features for me is that I can find, select, and act upon multiple files at once - without ever touching the mouse.
Alfred lets you quickly add the selected search-result to a “buffer” by pressing ⌥↑, and you can then type another query to find another file, add it to the buffer, and so on.
When you’ve found all the files you want, you can then press ⌥→ to take action on all the files in the buffer.
This barely scratches the surface of what Alfred can do. I can hardly use a Mac without it anymore.
Next, a utility I was only made aware of a short time ago, and I immediately bought a license: Shortcat. It’s basically Spotlight but for all visible controls and objects on the screen: it’s type-to-select for everything you can see.
Essentially, you type ⌘⇧Space, type a query, and Shortcat highlights elements on screen with quick-access keys. You can then use those keys to move the pointer to the relevant object, and click it by pressing ↩. It’s wildly, ridiculously fantastic. You should be using it.
Finally, the ultimate in keyboard control (and automation) is of course a macro utility. Automator is sort of similar, but my chosen app for this is Keyboard Maestro. If you’ve ever used QuicKeys or similar utilities, you’ll know what to expect. It’s incredibly deep and versatile, and you can extensively automate your workflow with it.
I’d recommend each of these utilities to you without hesitation.
Keep your hands where they belong
Controlling your Mac via the keyboard isn’t just faster and more satisfying, it can also remove a lot of pain from your life. Physical pain from contorting your wrists to use trackpads and mice, and tension headaches from nudging a pointer towards tiny targets all day long.
It takes time to learn what’s possible, and to re-train yourself to use the keyboard instead of reaching for the mouse, but the payoff in speed and efficiency is more than worth it.
Keep your eyes on the screen and your fingers on the keys, and you’ll be done in no time.
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