You should add keyboard shortcuts to your Mac

It’s one of the simplest ways to be more productive on a Mac: Learn the basic keyboard shortcuts, then move on to the advanced ones. Quickly pressing a couple keys is almost always faster than moving your mouse to a tool or menu bar and clicking the right thing. Over time it becomes second nature—if there’s something you do routinely, you learn the keyboard shortcut. It’s a big part of being “good with computers.” 

And it’s simple to learn keyboard shortcuts on a Mac, thanks to the menu bar at the top of the screen. Here you can browse everything and see the keyboard shortcut to the right. The problem: Sometimes you’ll find something in the menu bar without a keyboard shortcut. How are you supposed to do those things quickly? 

You might think you’ll need third party apps to add keyboard shortcuts, but that’s not true. There’s a way to do this in macOS itself. It’s a little buried in the settings, though, so I’m going to talk you through it. 

Adding keyboard shortcuts

To get started, take note of something in the menu bar for which you wish there was a keyboard shortcut. This can be literally anything, so long as it shows up while browsing the menu bar. For example: I have the Popular Science homepage bookmarked—I could make a keyboard shortcut for that.

To do so open the System Settings app and click Keyboard in the left panel—it’s toward the bottom. Next click the Keyboard Shortcuts button. 

Here you’ll find the ability to customize all sorts of the existing macOS keyboard shortcuts and even create new ones. For our purposes, adding keyboard shortcuts for menu bar items, we need the poorly named App Shortcuts. 

From here we can create our shortcut. It can be for every application or for a specific one. In my case I decided to make my shortcut specific to Safari, the browser I use. For the menu title, you’ll need to add the exact name of the menu item you want to launch with a keyboard shortcut—in my case that’s “Popular Science.” 

Click the Done button when everything looks right. The change should be there instantly—you can check by going back to the application you created the keyboard shortcut for and seeing if the shortcut shows up in the menu bar. 

You should now be able to trigger your chosen command with a quick keyboard shortcut. I’ve done this quite a few times over the years, to the point where I forget that the shortcuts I’ve added aren’t part of the default search experience. 

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