42 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts to Boost Productivity

Discover 42 essential Mac keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow and make you a more efficient developer.

Picture by Uillian Vargas

We repeatedly perform the same tasks while working on our computers all day, often using the mouse to move around the screen to click. We perform these tasks so frequently that if we sped them up by even a few seconds, it would save us a lot of time over a full day.

Just think about your routine on Google Chrome — when you open many tabs, search for something, and then you go to close the tab. Moving the mouse around to achieve all these actions is slower than moving your fingers on the keyboard because your muscle memory reacts way faster than your hand-eye coordination.

The key to improving your productivity is learning to use the keyboard instead of the mouse. This will speed up your routines exponentially and the better you get at them, the faster you’ll use your device!

Globals

• ⌘ + N open a new window.
• ⌘ + T open a new tab in the same window.
• ⌘ + A select the whole content of the current window.
• ⌘ + Del delete selected file(s).
• ⌘ + ⇧ + Del empty the trash bin.
• ⌘ + Space open Spotlight.
• ⌘ + Tab switch from left to right between opened apps.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + Tab switch from right to left between opened apps.
• ⌘ + W close a tab.
• ⌘ + Q close current app.
• ⌘ + P print the page.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + 3 take an entire page screenshot and save it on the desktop.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + 4 take a selection screenshot and save it on the desktop.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + 4 + space take an entire app window screenshot and save it on the desktop.
• ⌘ + F search in the current app.
• ⌘ + H hide the current window.
• ⌘ + C copy selection in the clipboard.
• ⌘ + V paste the clipboard content.
• ⌘ + X cut selection and set it in the clipboard.
• ⌘ + S use the save function of the current window.
• ⌘ + Z undo the last action.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + Z redo the last action.
• ⌘ + ↓ open selected file(s).
• ⌘ + ↑ navigate to the parent folder.
• ⌘ + I get info about selected file(s).
• ⌘ + M minimize the current window.
• ⌘ + , open the preferences page.
• ⌘ + ‘+’ zoom in window content.
• ⌘ + ‘-’ zoom out window content.
• ⌘ + 0 reset zoom level.
• ⌃ + ← or → navigate between screens.

Google Chrome

• ⌘ + N open a new window.
• ⌘ + T open a new tab in the same window.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + T reopen closed tabs.
• ⌘ + R refresh a page.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + R hard refresh a page.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + N open incognito-mode page.
• ⌘ + L focus the URL address bar.
• ⌘ + D save the current page in the bookmarks.
• ⌘ + Y open history.
• ⌘ + 0–9 navigate between opened tabs.
• ⌘ + ⇧ + Del clear page cache.

What’s next?

Believe it or not, whenever you introduce the habit of using these shortcuts, you will realize how reactive it can be to navigate online and interact with your machine!

There are tons of other shortcuts I use every day, related to many different applications used to work. This article is the most commonly used, especially for the majority of people who only use computers to navigate online.

Last updated: Thu Mar 26 2020