Did You Know That the Option Key…
Apple consultant Guillaume Gète has compiled a list of eighty actions modified by the Option key:
The little guide lists various tips, from the particularly useful to the very futile… Obviously, it is not a question here of being exhaustive, but rather to give ways to encourage you to remember to press the Option key during all your manipulations with the mouse and the keyboard… in order to save you time and make you more productive, even… have fun!
The clever tweaks, shortcuts, and affordances made available with the press of the Option key may not be obvious, but they significantly enhance the Mac experience for those who take the time to find and use them. Thanks to Guillaume for the reminder to keep seeing how the humble Option key can improve your digital life.
Keyboard Maestro primarily uses the Option key to mean “Help”. For example:
Keyboard Maestro’s basics are pretty straight forward, but there is a lot of different bits and pieces that would be difficult to memorise, so linking to reference Help on them makes it a lot easier for people, and using the Option key consistently across the program for that purpose means learning just one thing gives you access to all of that.
That’s one of my favorite tips! It also works in Microsoft Word and a few other apps.
A hint for anyone trying the BBEdit rectangular selection mode: In order to use it, you have to have Soft Wrap disabled for the current document. I have it on by default and always have to remember to turn it off when I want to use this feature.
I have to say, I am more excited about these “option” key flavors than I should be, but I recently discovered (after seeing this piece in TidBits) that I can insert a carriage-return (via option-return) within a (Numbers) spreadsheet cell. I love it !!
This is a useful combination to know as it also works in other text boxes where return would normally ‘submit’ instead of creating a new line – for instance in Messages.
Haven’t seen it mentioned here that in almost all Apple applications, if you press Option (or Command, or Shift, or any combination) while clicking on the drop-down menus, the action is displayed in the drop-down. A quicker and more efficient way of finding out possibilities than trying things out [or reading a user manual
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Interesting! Shift-Return has worked for that sort of thing in many places for a long time; I would never have thought to try Option-Return.
Ha! I’ve been using Option-Return for years in Apple Messages on Mac to insert a return versus sending the text. I don’t know why I never tried Shift-Return, but I just tested it and it works the same way.
I use it in pretty much every editor, from CotEditor (a great editor out of Japan with great support for Japanese text) to Panic’s Nova editor and even BBEdit. The only editor that gets it wrong is VSCode, there’s been an open issue on GitHub about that but they don’t seem to want to fix it.