[HOWTO] - Control your Finder navigation with keyboard

[Dradts]

Has anybody yet found out, that it is possible to control OS X' menus via keyboard? If not, try it out!

Just click onto a menu, like the Apple Menu, move the mouse cursor away from the menu, and press the up/down keys on ur keyboard! It seems to work in all applications (except classic apps).

 

[pbrice]

You can also enable Keyboard Access through the System Prefs Keyboard Pane.

Once enabled, you can turn it on/off with Ctrl+F1

Then, you can access the Menu & Dock without using your mouse at all.

Menu = Ctrl + F2 moves focus to Menu, and then you can use your arrow keys and enter to navigate through menus (not the System menu items (sound, clock,etc, though).

Dock = Ctrl + F3 moves focus to Dock. You can navigate through your Dock, even accessing the Dock menus through the keyboard.

Enjoy!

 

[Fahrvergnuugen]

Finder / Dock thing
You can command-tab to cycle through open applications and then hit q to quit an aplication without actually bringing it to the foreground. [don't let go of command while doing this]

 

[GadgetLover]

And for those of you with laptops where the F-keys have functionality (Brightness and Sound) and you don't want to deal with this, you can CHANGE the control + [function key] feature to control + [letter] feature (m = menu, d= dock).

 

[popey.marin]

One bas thing with the application switching is that is don't care about azerty/querty keyboards :-(((.
As a frensh user, I never use it, because I always forget I must hit the A key to close the selected app. Therefor, I prefere the dock's contextual menu.

I realy hope this will be corrected in X.2.

 

[bigbadbill]

If controlling your Mac with key commands is your thing, check out Youpi Key at:

http://perso.club-internet.fr/phupe/english/YKIndex.html

Very cool and FREE!

 

[xaqintosh]

are there any apps to control the F-keys by themselves without using cmd or ctrl or opt or anything?

 

[bigbadbill]

That is one drawback to Youpi Key. You must usa a modifier key.

 

[xaqintosh]

yeah, I really like youpi key except for that. I've been using it for a few weeks

 

[Didier Guillion]

Hi,

Is somebody know if a keyboard command can force a folder update to sort files by date ?

I use X.2.4 and the only way to do this is to click on all the modified files.

Closing the folder and opening it again or changing the date sorting don't do the job...

Best regards

 

[emaag]

As far as changing sort order, I've found that APPLE-OPTION-TAB and APPLE-OPTION-SHIFT-TAB let you cycle b/w the 1st and last element in you finder list dunno how to go about sorting the other elements.

 

[Didier Guillion]

Hi,

Yes but the files are still not sorted.
Another way I found is to Kill the finder...

Best regards