Keyboard Shortcuts

#workflows

Prologue: PSA

The Control key plays a fundamental role in a lot of shortcuts but it resides in a position that requires people to stretch their tendons. Not good if you want to avoid RSI issues! Instead, you can map the Caps Lock to the Control key, which is really straightforward on the Mac (see below).

Keyboard shortcuts are a big part of my workflow since minimizing mouse-keyboard switching saves a lot of time and fatigue. Here's a list of the shortcuts I find the most useful.

Text fields

Control-F: Move cursor forward one character
Control-B: Move cursor backward one character
Control-P: Move cursor up one character
Control-N: Move cursor down one character
Control-A: Move cursor to beginning of line
Control-E: Move cursor to end of line
Control-K: Delete entire line after cursor
Control-O: Insert new line after cursor

Sublime Text 3

Command-D: Selects entire word at cursor. Really useful for quickly selecting and deleting a word. (Keep pressing to expand selection to next occurrence.)
Command-K [U/L]: Converts selected text to Upper / Lower case
Command-T <file name>: Quickly open a file by name
Control-1: Selects the first group. You can also use 2, 3, … if you have more groups
Control-Tab: Alternates between last used tab (like a stack)
Control-G <line number>: Go to line number. Very useful for navigating to somewhere far away without using the mouse
Control-Minus: Jumps back to previous cursor position. Great if used in combination with above. You can use Ctrl-Shift-Minus to jump forward
Control-T: If you have multiple selections, this shortcut will “rotate the selection round-robin style. (If you have two selections it swaps them)
Control-Shift-J: Reveal current file in sidebar. I remapped this to be the same as the default shortcut combination in Xcode
Control-R: Switches to matching header/implementation file. This was a lot easier to press compared to the default Command-Option-Up

Finder

See the Instructions below for setting up these custom shortcuts.

Command-Shift-1: Open terminal at selected folder. Unfortunately this requires actually selecting a folder. If anyone knows how to do this without selecting please let me know!
Command-Shift-2: Create a ZIP archive of selected files.

Xcode

The first three shortcuts are very useful complements to each other:

Command-Shift-J: Show current finder in sidebar
Command-Shift-C: Move cursor to console area
Command-J: Move cursor to code editor
Command-Control-R: Continue running (when stopped at breakpoint)
Command-Shift-O: Open Quickly any file. (Vastly improved to add emacs support in Xcode 9!)

Custom shortcuts:

Option-Shift-S: Select iPhone SE simulator as destination
Option-Shift-6: Select iPhone 6 simulator as destination
Option-Shift-J: Select my iPhone as destination

Instructions

Below: Mapping Caps Lock to Control

Below: New terminal at folder (and many other services)

Below: Compress (Archive) files

Do you know some obscure shortcut or have your own favourite? Share it in the comments!

Top comments (4)

Armando Pérez Marqués • Jun 25 '17

The CapsLock -> Ctrl remap is also highly effective for Linux users. For Ubuntu, the most straight forward way of doing it was to install Gnome Tweak Tool and tick a checkbox in Typing -> Caps Lock as Ctrl.