The Modifier Key Adventure

Apple provides a variety of keyboards for Macintosh users today, but even the most minimal of them include the arrow and Control keys missing from the original Mac keyboards, and a fair number more. Aside from the character keys, on any recent Mac keyboard you can find Command, Control, Option, Function (usually labeled “fn”), Caps Lock, and, of course, Shift.

All of these keys (usually) do nothing on their own when pressed. Instead, they change what other keys do in conjunction with them. Such keys are usually called modifier keys and they’ve been around for a while: one of the earliest was the “Meta” key that first appeared on some early computer keyboards (it looms large in nerd legend).

The Shift modifier key has been around the longest. It is a key every typist knows: when held down, it makes a letter key produce an upper-case instead of a lower-case letter. There’s little mystery to what it (usually) does.

But what about the other modifier keys? What does Control control? What kinds of options does pressing Option provide? What are the commands that Command commands?

The Keyboard Command Caper

I previously talked about How Mac Menus Got Complicated. Here’s another menu-related complication, this one involving the keyboard.

There are some menu commands that you use so darn often that it soon becomes a real chore to lift your hand repeatedly from the keyboard, push your mouse up to the menubar, pull down the menu with the command you want, select the command, and then move your hand back to the keyboard so you can start typing again…if you can remember what it is you were going to say.

That’s why keyboard command shortcuts were born.

Keyboard command shortcuts have, from the beginning, involved holding down the Mac keyboard’s Command (⌘) key while pressing another key. The first such shortcuts were simple and either obvious or easily learned.

Take the canonical Edit menu shortcuts: ⌘-Z for Undo (the Z’s shape imitates a path that doubles back on itself), ⌘-X for Cut (doesn’t X kinda look like scissors?), ⌘-C for Copy (obviously), and ⌘-V for Paste (the V resembles the copyeditor’s “insert here” symbol). As a usability bonus, all the character keys used in these shortcuts are easily found at the left of the Mac keyboard’s bottom row adjacent to where the keyboard has its Command key. Another usability bonus: the order of the keys on the keyboard match the order of the commands they represent on the Edit menu. So neat, so orderly (Figure 12).

Unfortunately, apps have a tendency to proliferate. It would be foolish to hope that every keyboard command shortcut among so many apps could be as well thought out as the original canonical Edit shortcuts.

Consider: there are only so many characters to choose from on the keyboard, few of them are liable to match up memorably with the command they may represent, and there will be inevitable conflicts. How does a developer choose which command, File > Print or Format > Plain Text, gets assigned ⌘-P as a shortcut, and what does the developer assign to the loser in that contest?

To get around such mnemonic character conflicts, it wasn’t long before the Mac offered multiple-modifier keyboard command shortcuts. With multiple modifier keys in play, a developer can assign ⌘-P to the Print command and ⌘-Shift-P to the Plain Text command. But even though that technique at least partially alleviates the conflicting character problem, it still creates a memory burden for users.

The existence of multiple apps, each with its own way of doing things, makes the burden heavier. How do you, the poor user, remember that this word processor uses ⌘-P for Print, but that word processor, which you sometimes have to use for business reasons, uses ⌘-P for Plain Text?

Your memory burden gets even worse when you confront really complicated apps with myriad menu commands, apps that spawn menu shortcut monsters like ⌘-Shift-Option-R (the keyboard command shortcut for Format > Remove Formatting and Styles in the word processor I’m currently using, and not to be confused with ⌘-Shift-R, the shortcut for Remove Formatting Except Styles).

The Keyboard Shortcut Heist

But what if the keyboard command shortcuts don’t meet your needs? What if, for example, you almost never print documents but use the Format > Plain Text command all the time? Wouldn’t you rather that your preferred word processing app used ⌘-P instead of ⌘-Shift-P for the Plain Text command?

As it turns out, macOS lets you do just that. With a trip to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts (Figure 14), you can add to or modify the keyboard shortcuts in any app.

If you do this, though, you can create a new mystery for yourself should you happen to use a key combination for a command in an app that conflicts with another command in that same app. In that case, your change overrides the existing keyboard shortcuts in that app, but your Mac won’t tell you tell you that you just clobbered an existing keyboard shortcut in the process (although there are third party apps that might help).

The Alternative Character Enigma

In the misty depths of the forgotten past, years before personal computers emerged, I had a Smith-Corona electric typewriter that had two replaceable keys: each replaceable key comprised a metal character element to attach to one of the typewriter’s two special typebars and a corresponding character cap to go on the keyboard. As I recall, the special keys I purchased included the German ß and the © symbol.

The Mac, when it finally arrived on the scene, had no such replaceable characters and key caps, but the ß and © I had paid good money for in my lean college years were easily available because, as I pointed out a number of pages back:

A computer keyboard is just a big collection of buttons.

Which meant that the Mac’s software could provide alternative characters for any key. By convention, the Mac made a rich set of those alternatives available when a modifier key, usually the Option key, was held down.

Lest you think that finding out the alternative characters each key offered was a mystery, it wasn’t much of one. That’s because early versions of the Macintosh operating system offered a built-in solution: Key Caps, a simple app that displayed the keyboard layout. When you held down a modifier key, Key Caps displayed the alternative characters for each key.

Although Key Caps, like the classic Macintosh operating system, is no longer with us, its successor, the Keyboard Viewer app, is alive and well (Figure 15).

No, the mystery these days isn’t what the keyboard’s alternative characters are and where they lie: the mystery is where to find the Keyboard Viewer app.

On the early Macs, Key Caps was a standard “desk accessory,” a type of small app available on the Apple  menu. Unfortunately, desk accessories never made the jump from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X 10.0 and its descendants. Instead, it was renamed and moved to the input menu, one of the optional menus available on the right side of the Mac menu bar, the side reserved for status menus (see What’s in the menu bar on Mac to unravel the mystery of what a “status menu” is).

That’s right: although the keyboard’s alternative characters are always available, the map to finding them is available from an optional menu—and it’s quite possible your Mac isn’t displaying it. To display the optional input menu, go to System Preferences > Keyboard and do any one of the following:

• Enable at least two input sources.

• On the Keyboard tab, check Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar.

• On the Input Sources tab, check Show input menu in menu bar.

Once you display the input menu (it looks like a national flag), you can choose Show Keyboard Viewer from it and find your buried character treasure.

The Extended Selection Conundrum

As we learned in Verb → Noun vs. Noun → Verb, when you issue a command on the Mac, it usually requires that you first select what the command will act upon. Selecting stuff is a big part of using a Mac.

It’s easy to select a single thing on your Mac’s screen: in most cases you just point at it and click. What’s harder is when you want to select multiple things for a command to act upon: for example, a group of files in the Finder, a bunch of pictures in Photos, words in a Pages document.

In such cases, you can often drag over the items you want to select. And that’s fine, if everything you want to select is visible in the application window.

But when part of the group of things you want to select extends beyond the window’s borders, like, say, a long list of files in the Finder, you have to hold down, drag to the edge of the window, keep holding down as you let the window scroll and bring the items you want to include into view, and then, finally, let up at just the right moment because the window keeps scrolling, and the selection keeps extending itself until you do. Whew! There’s got to be a better way.

And in most cases, there is, but the technique is not apparent from any visual affordance. Instead, it’s a technique that you simply have to be told about—maybe by a friend, or a Help file, or a TidBITS article. It’s a mouse-plus-keyboard maneuver, and it’s been around for a very long time…for so long, in fact, that most veteran Mac users can’t even remember when they first learned it. It’s the Shift-click.

It works like this:

1. Click where you want to start selecting.

2. Move to where you want to stop selecting.

3. Hold down Shift and click again.

It’s simple, and, even though it’s not obvious, it’s so easy to learn that it quickly becomes second nature, and afterwards easy to mistake for being intuitive when it is, in fact, anything but.

And it also doesn’t cover the case when you want to select a group of disparate objects, such as two groups of files in a Finder list (Figure 16).

The Mac convention for making a discontiguous selection is to use a ⌘-click instead of a Shift-click: hold down the ⌘-key as you click items to add them to a selection. You can even combine the two in some cases. For example, in a Finder list, you can select a group of files using a Shift-click, then scroll away from the selection, ⌘-click to select another file to add to the selection, and then even scroll further away and Shift-click again, thus selecting a second group of files in addition to the first.

Easy, once you know how, but a total mystery if you’ve never heard of Shift-clicking or ⌘-clicking.

The Input Source Imbroglio

Almost since its inception, the Mac has had multilingual capabilities, which have grown vastly over the years. On today’s Macs you can type in well over a hundred languages. Moreover, many of those languages can be typed using more than one keyboard layout—my Mac currently offers 15 keyboard layouts just for English (Figure 17).

The key to accessing your Mac’s various language keyboard layouts is the input menu, which I briefly mentioned back in The Alternative Character Enigma. With this handy system menu, the multilingual Mac user can switch between different language keyboards with ease (the Apple Support article, Type in another language on your Mac with input sources, describes how to add keyboard layouts to the menu).

That’s great. Until you lose track of which keyboard layout you currently have enabled, something that is rather easier to do than you might think. Sure, the input menu is up there on the menu bar telling you what the current layout is, but it is a small menu (Figure 18) and easily overlooked (especially on a large-screen Mac), and, besides, you intentionally chose the current layout, didn’t you?

Also, you may not have chosen the current input source intentionally: when your input menu has more than one input source on it, macOS kindly offers you two keyboard shortcuts, Control-Space and Option-Control-Space. With these you can choose the next or previous input source on the input menu. And I can tell you from personal experience that the Control-Space shortcut is easy to hit accidentally.

Here’s an example. One day, as I was browsing through some images in the Finder, using the Quick Look shortcut to see them (select an image file and press the Space bar to see it in a floating window), the edge of my left hand accidentally brushed the Control key, which sits at the lower left corner of the keyboard. That accidental contact at just the wrong time turned my Quick Look into an inadvertent input source selection. In this case it changed my keyboard layout from English to French.

I didn’t discover the mistake immediately. I first noticed things were amiss when I clicked back into an app I was using, pressed ⌘-Q to quit it, and found that the app didn’t quit. I initially thought the app was misbehaving and had somehow become deaf to that keyboard shortcut (the Quit menu command itself still worked). It was only when I began to write an email that I saw what was really going on: I was using the French keyboard layout, on which the A and Q swap their positions from where they appear on a standard American English keyboard. The ⌘-Q I had thought I was typing was actually a ⌘-A.

The Substitute Text Surprise

Even when you have your input sources properly set and have placed your fingers on all the right keys, you still may not end up typing what you thought you were typing. That’s often because your Mac is trying to be helpful.

In the early days, most such help was the purview of individual apps, which in many cases provided spell checking and such typographical niceties as substituting typographic open and closed quotes (e.g., “”) for typewriter style straight quotes (like " and ’). Over time, however, Apple itself started to include such active assistance in macOS. These aids, in part, were informed by the typing aids it was developing and refining for its phone and tablet devices.

Today, macOS provides text entry assistance that tends to match the assistance provided by individual apps as illustrated in Figure 19, Figure 20, and Figure 21 (see the Apple support articles Replace text and punctuation in documents on Mac and Check spelling and grammar on Mac).

This addition to macOS can be a great boon, but it’s also a source of confusion because the rules governing which set of correction and replacement options—an app’s or macOS’s—takes precedence varies (not to mention any additional confusion you may encounter if you have installed a third-party text-expansion tool). For example:

• Some apps’ correction and replacement options completely override the ones in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text.

• Some apps override the System Preferences > Keyboard > Text correction settings but include the replacement settings as a superset of its own. For instance, when the app doesn’t specify that typing (c) produces ©, but System Preferences > Keyboard > Text does specify that replacement, when you type (c) in the app you’ll get ©.

• Some apps (like Stickies) may offer no replacement and correction options of their own but include the current system settings in each newly created document; should the system’s settings subsequently change, the text replacement and correction settings stored in a previously created document have precedence when that document is edited.

There are many other possible variations. The only way you can find out how specific apps and documents interact with the System Preferences > Keyboard > Text replacement and correction settings is on a case-by-case basis.