By • 6:00 am, April 3, 2015 • • Using these simple keyboard tricks will make your life so much better. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Mastering a few crucial Mac keyboard shortcuts will make using your Apple computer easier and much more efficient. Cutting your reliance on your mouse will help you work more quickly, and you’ll undoubtedly impress your family, friends and co-workers to no end. You might even end up becoming the go-to Mac person in your office, and we all know how wonderful that will be. Here are the top 10 Mac keyboard shortcut tricks you really need to memorize right now, whether you’re a Mac newbie or a veteran user who still uses the mouse for everything out of habit. Top 10 Mac keyboard shortcuts Ingredients: • Any Mac running OS X • Mac-compatible keyboard (has a Command key, not Windows) Directions: First up, take a look at the Mac keyboard in front of you to familiarize yourself with a few Mac-specific keys. The Command key has a special symbol (⌘) to help you recognize it, while the Option key can also say “alt” on it, a term borrowed from a Windows environment.

Your keyboard may also have a Function key (fn) next to the Control key (which just bears its own name — “control”). Great strategy games for mac. Many of these shortcuts have an equivalent menu item you’ll find at the top of your Mac’s screen. One way of finding new shortcuts is to look to the right of any menu item and see if a keyboard shortcut is listed. Now that you’ve got a good idea of where to find these keys, let’s take a look at some great ways to use them. (In addition to writing out the instructions, we’ve also created a pair of videos to walk you through them in case you prefer to learn that way. You’ll find them at the bottom of this post.) Quit any Mac program Command-Q: If you’re coming from a Windows computer, you might have gotten used to “X-ing out” of your applications by clicking on the X button at the top of any application window. In OS X, you close windows with the red X button (in the upper left of your window), but it will not quit the app.

To do a right-click: Press and hold down the ctrl key and then click the mouse or touchpad button. Alternately, you may also right-click using the multi-touch trackpad. First, position the pointer over the link or button you wish to right-click. Press the trackpad with your index finger.

The open-source program gives users a wide range of options for recording and editing audio, all tied together with a simple interface, and everything Audacity has to offer is free of charge. The Audio Production and Recording category contains programs developed to let users edit, record, mix, tweak, encode, and compose digital audio files, including applications that convert MP3 files. Free audio recording software free download - Audio Hijack Pro, Ondesoft Audio Recorder, MediaHuman Audio Converter, and many more programs. Award-winning audio recording software for recording sound on PC or Mac. Download free. Audio recorder programs to record mp3, music, voice, sound and audio. Learn more about audio recording and editing software Download the free home version. Also available for iPhone, iPad and Android. Best free audio recording software for mac.

To fully exit out of any Mac program in OS X, you’ll need to use the Quit command with this shortcut, or click on the app menu, then choose Quit. Close Mac windows quickly Command-W, Option-Command-W: The first of these will close whatever active window you are using, while the second one will close all the windows in the currently active app (or Finder, which is also an app, really). These shortcuts will do the same thing as the Close Window option in the Finder and most other apps. Chrome, for example, delineates between Close Window ( Command-W) and Close Tab ( Command-Shift-W). Open a new web browser tab on Mac Command-T: Whether you’re in a web browser like Safari or Chrome or in the Finder itself, this keyboard shortcut will open a new tab for you. In Chrome, Command-Shift-T will open the most recently closed tab for you.

Keep hitting this shortcut to open multiple tabs (or continue opening tabs in reverse chronological order in Chrome). Quickly switch between Mac applications The application switcher is just a keystroke away. Photo: Rob LeFebvre Command-Tab, Command-~: The first of these shortcuts will activate Mac OS X’s built-in application switcher, which will let you switch between active apps running on your Mac.

Keep holding down the Command key and press Tab repeatedly to go to the next app from left to right. Use Command-~ (tilde, usually above the Tab key) to switch to running apps from right to left. Holding down the Command key and hitting Q will quit whatever program you are currently highlighting. Cut, copy and paste on Mac Command-X, Command-C, Command-V: These are three of the things I do most often in my writing life, so mousing up to the Edit menu in an app to choose these functions from a menu makes me cringe. Learn these three essential shortcuts (Command-X for cut, Command-C for copy and Command-V for paste — go figure), and you’ll save a ton of time every day. Find something fast on your Mac Command-F: Search is a massive part of any computer user’s workflow, from finding the right document to looking for a key word or phrase in Safari.