Dr. Mac's OS X Tip-of-the-Day  

I have been looking for a complete listing of Mac keyboard shortcuts for as long as I can remember. I know most of them by heart, but it would be nice to have the complete compendium here on my hard disk for those moments when my brain spazzes out.

I have used the AppleCare KnowledgeBase for this until recently, but last time I searched it for "Mac OS X and Keyboard Shortcut" I got 18 hits. I don't have time to read 18 articles every time I need to refresh my memory about a shortcut. So I was thrilled to find Dave Polaschek's Magical Macintosh Key Sequences Web page.

Dave, is the president of "Better Nerds," (ya gotta love that), but he's probably better-known for this page. It contains, according to Dave, "all the magic key sequences to make your Mac do various things."

Says Dave,

"It's pretty sad that there are so many "hidden" things in an OS that's supposed to be so easy to use. I hadn't thought about it before, but the sheer volume of them has surprised me. I knew of the existence of a lot of these shortcuts myself, but I'd never tried to think of them all at once until I started compiling this page. Now that I have many of them in one place (there's more to be added - I think there always will be), I find myself wondering about "ease of use". Anyway, enjoy."

For each item you'll find the key combination and what it does. It's broken into the following categories, each of which contains a plethora of useful keyboard shortcuts.

• On Boot
• After display of Happy Mac icon
• As Finder starts
• In Finder
• After startup
• In the sleep/restart dialog
• In other dialogs
• On keyboards with a function key
• Clicks
• Control Strip

Several Web sites linked to this page last week. I wish I could remember which ones so I could thank them. But I don't, so I can't.

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Bob LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS and the author of 38 books, including Mac OS X For Dummies and The Little iTunes Book.