Lowell Montgomery
Feb 23, 2017 · 3 min read

While you are talking about Cmd+Arrow shortcuts, it’s worth noting that Cmd+Up Arrow moves the cursor to the beginning of a file. And Cmd+Down Arrow takes you to the end.

And holding down Shift while performing cursor movement actions selects the text in between your starting and ending position, e.g. Option+Right Arrow jumps to the next word and holding Shift while doing so selects any text in between.

Also many of the commands listed in the article for Chrome are used in most Mac browsers (Safari/Firefox, etc.) The keyboard shortcuts for flipping through window tabs is different between Chrome and Safari (Safari uses Cmd+Shift+Arrow, whereas Chrome/Firefox use Cmd+Option+Arrow), but most are the same, including opening a new tab. with Cmd+T. Indeed, even outside of the browser, most of the keyboard shortcuts listed for Chrome work across other apps. Basically any proper Mac app should close the active window or tab with Cmd+W; that is not at all Chrome-specific. That’s like Cmd+Q to quit an app; very standard.

And lest we forget that not everyone knows the other standard keyboard shortcuts that generally work across all native Mac apps (there are many of them and I think those are the ones you should really be sure to know):

Cmd+A: normally selects all text in the window
Cmd+C: Copies whatever is selected to the clipboard
Cmd+D: Add to favorites (in most browsers) / Duplicate (in finder and other appropriate places)
Cmd+F: “Find” in most applications, including all browsers I use.
(and Cmd+Shift+F: Is find in project for most text editors I use)
Cmd+M: Minimizes the active window
Cmd+N: Opens a new window (or creates a new document)
Cmd+O: Opens a saved document (dialog to navigate to what you want to open). And if you have multiple documents selected in the Finder or similar, you can open them all at once with this.
Cmd+P: Normally opens the print dialog
Cmd+S: allows you to save
Cmd+Shift+S: is normally “Save as…”
Cmd+V: Pastes from the clipboard
Cmd+X: Cuts/deletes selected text to the clipboard
Cmd+Z: Normally maps to “Undo” (a last action or typically removes typed text one word at a time). You can hit that multiple times to undo several deletions/actions, but some apps may have a limited buffer.
Cmd+Shift+Z: Is Re-do, especially useful if you’ve undone too many steps.
(Cmd+Y is sometimes also used for re-do, but normally only in non-standard apps, like those from Microsoft.)

Text formatting shortcuts are so standard that even Web applications, like the one I’m using now, to enter this text, tends to support them, but I know some people reach for the mouse every time:
Cmd+B: Marks selected text bold
Cmd+i: Marks selected text italic
Those text formatting shortcuts are common in editors with hidden markup, e.g. TextEdit, Mail, MS Word, etc. But some good text editors are also designed nicely enough to contextually enter the right formatting when you use the bold/italic keyboard shortcuts, e.g. by adding appropriate asterisks/underscore characters if you are editing a Markdown document or insert <strong> /<em> tags if you are working in HTML.

I’m a big fan of establishing productive workflows, so I was already pretty familiar with the keyboard shortcuts mentioned in this article. I might add that in addition to keyboard shortcuts, there are also ways to alias common Terminal commands and you can set up aliases for Git, too (I thought of that when looking at the .gifs with “git commit -m”. I normally type “gcm” for that, but it’s a custom convenience. (I also use “gpl” for “git pull” and “gps” for “git push”, among others. If you spend a lot of time on the command line working with Git, it’s worth the small effort to create some aliases (and also aliases for trickier things you do in the bash shell), e.g. if I type “ca” in the terminal (my shortcut meaning “create alias”), and hit “enter” it opens up my ~/.bash_profile in my text editor of choice and I can create more. I’ve created a few shortcuts for long, tedious shell commands that I always had to look up to get right (this is another one from my .bash_profile):
alias showFiles=’defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app’

That reveals all “hidden” system files in the Finder. And if you are adding that to your own .bash_profile, be sure to fix the quotes. (The Medium.com editor is replacing them with type-set curved apostrophes, not single straight quotes).

    Lowell Montgomery

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    Lowell is an opinionated Web developer, photographer, writer, and new dad, currently based in Frankfurt, Germany.

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