When you boot up a Mac and use Mac OS X for the first time, the best you

can do with the keyboard is type using the standard characters that form
the English language and use a few keyboard shortcuts that you are
familiar with. But your keyboarding abilities on Mac OS X can be taken
quite a bit beyond that, in ways not obvious to many, and in this article we
take a look at the various ways you can do that.

Keyboard Preference Pane

The Keyboard preference pane in System Preferences is the most obvious
place to start and probably the one that most readers already know about,
but here’s a recap. The most obvious thing expert typists would want to
do is increase the key repeat rate and decrease the delay until repeat to
make your typing faster. We’ve found that typing becomes much more
efficient at the maximum settings for each, but you may feel comfortable
at lower speeds.

The other thing you want to do is enable the “Show Keyboard & Character
Viewers in menu bar” option; it’s a neat feature that we will get back to
later in this article. If you hit the Modifier Keys button here, it’ll bring up a
sheet that will allow you to change the function of your modifier keys like
Caps Lock, Control, Option and Command. Two good uses are to (a)
disable the Caps Lock key if you find it of little use; and (b) interchange
the positions of the Command and Option keys if you are using a keyboard
not optimised for Macs
Finally, if you are using an Apple keyboard, the “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys
as standard function keys” setting lets you toggle their functionality
between controlling system features and being normal function keys. By
default, they control hardware features like the screen’s brightness and
volume levels and other system features like music playback, Mission
Control and the Dashboard. Depending on the choice you make, the
alternative function can be accessed by pressing them in combination with
the Function (Fn) key.

Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

The first thing you want to do in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab is switch the
“Full Keyboard Access” setting to “All controls” (which can also be done
using the Ctrl+F7 shortcut). The next time you are staring at a sheet with
the options Cancel and Discard, the Cancel button will be surrounded with
a light blue glow, indicating that the button can be pressed by hitting the
spacebar. Pressing the Tab key passes the control to other buttons and
interactive elements of the UI.

In this tab, you can see a bunch of apps and features of the system listed
on the left side and their keyboard shortcuts on the right. This is a great
way to familiarise yourself with the keyboard shortcuts available to you in
various parts of Mac OS X. You can also go in and change any of them to
something you’re more comfortable with. Apple furnishes you with a list of
common keyboard shortcuts for Mac OS X, while graphics instructor and
designer Dan Rodney has a much more comprehensive and well-organised
list available on his website.

The real fun, however, is in adding keyboard shortcuts of your own. If you
frequently use the Merge All Windows command in Safari, for instance, or
the Export option in many apps, you may find yourself frustrated by
having to reach for the menu bar over and over again to access them.
Custom keyboard shortcuts let you solve that problem.
Go to the Application Shortcuts option and then hit the Add (+) button to
start adding a new keyboard shortcut. Choose any app from the ones
listed in the Application menu, or by going through your Applications
folder using the Other option at the end of the menu. Once you’ve
selected an app—say, Safari—you have to enter the menu title of the
command you want to create a shortcut for. Be sure to enter it exactly as
you see it in the app’s menus and then enter a keyboard shortcut in the
next box.

If you select “All Applications” in the Applications menu instead of a

specific app, the shortcut you create will be applicable to all apps on the
system that have that option in their menus. The “Export…” command is a
good one to start with—used in conjunction with the Cmd+Shift+S
shortcut, it can bring back the Save As option to many of the apps thatlost
it in the transition from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.7 Lion.

Changing the System Language

If you use British English outside of the UK and want your computer not to
spell “humour” as “humor” and “organise” as “organize”, launch the
Language & Text preference pane and hit the Edit List button under the
Language tab. Scroll down to find British English among the list of
languages, enable it and hit OK. Back in the languages list, you’ll find that
it has replaced English at the top spot. Next, switch to the Text tab and
select British English from the Spelling drop down menu. You may also
want to enable “Correct spelling automatically” if it isn’t already.

Text Substitution
A handy feature of Mac OS X is its ability to speed up your typing by
allowing you to set up text substitution. To get started, enable “Use
symbol and text substitution” under the Text tab in Language & Text and
then scroll down the table below to take a look at some of the presets.
To add your own, hit the Add (+) button and enter both the trigger text on
the left side and the replacement on the right. If you want “tnw” to be
replaced by “The Next Web”, for instance, enter the former on the left and
the latter on the right. Good candidates for this list are names, usernames,
email addresses, addresses, salutations and other things that you end up
typing repeatedly throughout the day.

But you aren’t done yet! For some strange reason, Mac OS X does not
actually enable the feature systemwide when you do so in System
Preferences. You now have to right-click (or Ctrl+click) inside a text box in
every app where you want to use the feature (Mail, Safari, TextEdit and
Twitter, for example) and enable Text Replacement under the
Substitutions menu. You can also enable the other options there based on
your preference.

Thankfully, this is a one-time deal and, henceforth, text replacement will

always be enabled within that app until you choose to disable it. You can
now type “tnw” and hit the spacebar or return key to see it magically turn
into “The Next Web”. The feature works in almost exactly the same
manner on an iOS device running iOS 5 as well, so you may want to set up
some text substitutions on your iPad or iPhone too.

Entering Special Characters

 Mac OS X has robust support for
entering special characters and symbols while typing and there are
several ways to do it. For entering accented versions of characters in the
English alphabet, you can hold down the keys on the keyboard to bring up
relevant options. If you hold down ‘E’, for instance, you’ll see a menu
come up with options to type seven accented versions of the letter. You
can use the arrow keys to navigate to one of those choices or hit the
number associated with it to jump straight to it.

For entering other special

characters, you need to pull up the Keyboard Viewer. If you enabled
the “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar” option in the
Keyboard preference pane as described above, you will now see a new
icon in your menu bar that looks like the one in the screenshot on the
right. Click on it and select Show Keyboard Viewer.

With the virtual keyboard displayed, you can press and hold the Option
key to see the characters on it change to a different set. Press the Shift
key in addition to it and you’ll see more characters still. This is a map of all
the special characters you can enter using standard keyboard keys. For
example, to enter the Euro currency symbol (€), you need to hit
Option+Shift+2, while just entering Option+2 will get you the trademark
sign (™).
With the Option key pressed, you’ll also see five keys on the keyboard
coloured orange. You can use these to enter accented characters if, for
some reason, you dislike the method described above. Hit Option+E to
type the accent (´) and then follow it up with a letter that supports it (like
‘a’ or ‘e’). So Option+E, followed by an ‘e’ gives you ‘é’, and Option+N,
followed by an ‘a’ gives you ‘ã’.

Entering Symbols
Now that you know how to type “exposé”, how about entering a fancy
forward-facing arrow (➟) or a degree celsius (℃) symbol? For those you
need the Mac OS X Character Viewer. It can be brought up using the same
menu that you used to access the Keyboard Viewer and this is what it
looks like:
Select any of the categories on the left and then drag in a symbol from the
options in the middle section into your document. You can see the list of
related characters and variations of the one you have currently selected. If
you plan to use a character often, you can add it to your favourites to
make it easier to access. The Recently Used menu is self-explanatory and
the search field lets you type in the name of a character to find it (for
example, searching for “franc” will bring up the symbol for the French
Franc).

If you want even more symbols, click on the gear icon on the top-left of
the window and select Customize List. From the sheet that comes up, you
can select more categories of symbols and various scripts from all around
the world. Whether you want characters from the phonetic alphabet or
technical symbols or Greek or Tibetan scripts, it’s all there. Once you’ve
enabled the categories you want, hit Done and they will appear in the
Character Viewer.
Typing in a Different Language
If you want to type in a different language on Mac OS X, go into the Input
Sources tab of the Language & Text preference pane and select the
language/script that you would like to use. You can select as many as you
want and then use the Keyboard Shortcuts button to assign them a
shortcut that will easily let you switch between them. The other option is
to press the menu bar button that you used for bringing up the character
and keyboard viewers above and it will now have your newly enabled
languages.

If you select ‘Bangla – QWERTY’, you will now be able to type in Bengali.
To make it easier, bring up the Keyboard Viewer after you have selected
the language (the icon in the menu bar will change to reflect your new
selection) and you’ll see which keyboard key corresponds to which Bengali
letter. It requires some practice, but you’ll soon be typing in বাংলা
(Bengali), Ελληνικά (Greek), 한 국 어 / 조 선 말 (Korean) or русский язык
(Russian) on your Mac.

Typing Shortcuts
None of the keyboards Apple ships with its computers by default today
include the number pad and various other keys like Home, End, Forward
Delete, Page Up, Page Down, etc., and new Mac users are often frustrated
by the seeming lack of these options. You probably already know that
 Cmd+C copies text, Cmd+V pastes it and Cmd+A selects it all, but did you
know that Cmd+Del erases a full sentence?

Here are some of the most commonly used Mac OS X typing shortcuts
while doing text entry:

 Option+Delete: Deletes a whole word.

 Option+Left/Right Arrow: Moves the cursor by one
word in either direction.
 Option+Up/Down Arrow: Moves the cursor to the
beginning or end of the paragraph respectively.
 Cmd+Delete: Deletes a whole sentence.
 Cmd+Left/Right Arrow: Moves the cursor to the
beginning or end of the sentence respectively.
 Cmd+Up/Down Arrow: Moves the cursor to the
beginning or end of the document respectively.
 Fn+Del: Forward delete.
As a bonus, you can combine the cursor movement shortcuts mentioned
above with the Shift key to select text as the cursor is moved. Once you
get used to these keyboard shortcuts, you’ll find yourself navigating
through lengthy documents much more efficiently.

Miscellaneous Tips
To conclude this article, we’d like to share with you a couple of tips that
will make typing a little less frustrating with some of the features we have
described above. If you have automatic spelling correction enabled, you’ll
sometimes run into the system trying to correct a spelling that you have
purposely misspelt. To ignore its suggested correction, hit the Escape key
before you hit the Spacebar to continue. If you find yourself typing that
word often, it’s a good idea to right-click (or Ctrl+click) on it and select
Learn Spelling, so that the system never tries to automatically correct it
for you again.
Another neat trick is to use text substitution in combination with the
special characters supported by Mac OS X. When you have to open the
Character Viewer repeatedly to get to a special character that you type
often, it becomes tedious, even if you have it saved as a favourite. In such
a situation, it may be a good idea to set up a text substitution for it as
described above. I, for instance, often find myself typing the Indian Rupee
symbol and have my Mac set up so that typing “rs” replaces it with the
currency symbol (₹). It makes life a little bit easier.

We hope that we were able to teach you a neat new trick or two about
your Mac today, but there’s no doubt other useful text entry and
keyboard-based features on Mac OS X. We keep learning new stuff all the
time, and will be sure to let you know if we run into more Mac OS X
features that you should know about.