Comments on: Navigate Mac OS X dialog boxes using only your keyboard

By: Mark McLellan

Mark McLellan — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:46:09 +0000

@ant – thanks, that was driving me mental, much appreciated.
@mareo – thanks for the extra shortcuts. At least in Windows the shortcut letters are underlined. Another Mac un-usability feature.

By: Mareo Raft

Mareo Raft — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 06:05:25 +0000

It seems that with the following keyboard shortcuts, you may be able to get by without the “All controls” option. Still, it would be a lot easier if apple gave us a simpler way to control our computer.

ESC – selects CANCEL
cmd+”.” – selects CANCEL
cmd+”d” – selects DON’T SAVE
cmd+”r” – selects REPLACE
ENTER – selects the blue highlighted box

“s” – selects SLEEP in the shutdown dialogue
“r” – selects RESTART in the shutdown dialogue
cmd+alt+eject – makes the compute sleep (this is a global shortcut, try it!)

By: Mareo Raft

Mareo Raft — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 05:48:42 +0000

This feature is both a blessing and a curse. It allows you to tab through dialogue boxes, but it also forces you to tab through all the buttons on all of your applications.

If you used to use tab in iTunes to go from the search to the playlists to the song field, for example, it now tabs through a lot of new fields you don’t want.

I hope apple will separate this feature into two options. Seems like its everything or nothing right now.

you can contact me at my name shown, plus “gmail.com” at the end.

By: Jared

Jared — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:43:03 +0000

I’ve switched to ‘all controls’ and still no dice. Help!

By: Cron

Cron — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:08:34 +0000

Such a simple thing, and yet it was driving me crazy. Do Apple and Jobs hate us?

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:05:41 +0000

This info was exactly what I was looking for – thank you!

By: Hari

Hari — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:40:30 +0000

I am using mac more and more lately and this was one of the first irritants for me, along with the maximize button. Thanks for pointing the preference, it seemed to work on a couple of dialogs that I tried (MacVim and Entourage), so definitely a big productivity gain.

By: Ant

Ant — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:43:59 +0000

James,
Try pressing the spacebar to activate the outlined button. Hitting Enter will activate the solid filled button every time, whether a different button is outlined or not.

By: James

James — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:34:39 +0000

Well the tab change the blue outline around each button but hit enter and you still get OK

This does not work

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 11 May 2010 01:35:53 +0000

Thanks for the great tip!!!

By: jen

jen — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 13:32:14 +0000

Thanks, This has always driven me insane. Call me fussy, but why can’t you just use the arrow keys like on a pc?

By: KeithHopkin

KeithHopkin — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 06:51:36 +0000

Great info, but it doesn’t work in Photoshop (and probably many others). Pretty frustrating.

By: Erik

Erik — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:41:11 +0000

Unfortunately, this still doesn’t work for all dialog boxes (for example, keychain password dialog box for connecting to wireless networks).

By: Joi

Joi — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:46:41 +0000

I always wondered why the tab key wouldn’t work on those dialog boxes. Such a simple fix! Thank you :)