Hot Tip Tuesday: Custom application shortcuts

No one wants to right-click to copy or paste, so we all use the ⌘C and ⌘V keyboard shortcuts, right?. But did you know you can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts as well? Maybe you did, but it’s surprising how few know about this MacOS feature, and even more surprising how few ever bother to use it. I make them religiously for just about every app I use. I create at least a couple of custom keyboard shortcuts to perform handy actions in the each of the apps I use most (most recently Sketch, Evernote, and Chrome).

Sketch

My favorite custom made Sketch shortcuts are Collapse All Layer Groups (which I set to ⌥⌘L), Flatten Selection to Bitmap (⌥⌘B), and Reverse Layer Order (⌥⌘R (this one requires the amazing Automate plugin)). That’s right, you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to commands made available by Sketch plugins.

Evernote

I used custom keyboard shortcuts to recreate some common key commands Evernote is missing for some reason. I use ⌘[ and ⌘] to increase and decrease indent levels, and ⌘L and ⇧⌘L to toggle bulleted and numbered lists respectively.

Chrome

I use pinned tabs quite a bit, but was frustrated that there was no keyboard shortcut to help me out. Now I can hit ^⌥P to pin or unpin any tab.

If this is interesting to you in the least, it’s a feature worth exploring. It only takes a few seconds to set up and it could be a real time saver.

Find and make your own Keyboard Shortcuts in your System Preferences: Keyboard > Shortcuts > App shortcuts.