Quickly open any Mac menu command with your keyboard

Windows has long had a quick & easy way that keyboard junkies can open menu commands: press Alt+[Letter], where the letter is underlined in the top menu, then press another (underlined) letter to select the sub-menu item¹. So, for instance, to quickly close the current document, you might press Alt-F to activate the File menu, then C for Close².

Linux has the same behaviors. For people who avoid the mouse, as I do, this is great.

But I use a Mac most of the time, and Apple does NOT have anything like the “press Alt-[Letter] & then another letter” trick. Aesthetically, yeah, it is pretty ugly. And we all know how the first Macs didn’t even have arrow keys, in order to force people to use the then new-fangled mouse. The point being, there’s been a prejudice towards the mouse for a long time in Mac OS.

However, there IS a way to get the same effect, and, if anything, it’s a bit more elegant (no surprise there). If you press Command-Shift-?, the Help menu expands, with the cursor placed into the Search box. Start typing the beginning letters found in commands, and Search shows you a list of results. You can then use your arrow keys (now found on every Mac!) and Enter to select & run commands found in menus. As a bonus, a nice big cute blue cartoony arrow appears next to the selected menu command, making it crystal clear what you’re about to do.

So it’s not the same thing as found in Windows or Linux, but it could be argued that it’s better. And Apple also doesn’t hide the capability by default, like Microsoft has been doing in recent releases of Windows, which is a good thing. Try it—once you get used to it, it really is pretty useful.