10.3: Create Command-key-only keyboard shortcuts

Oct 30, '03 10:34:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

One of the great additions to Panther is the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard and Mouse prefs. In particular, the ability to add a KB shortcut for any menu item in any (or all) applications is fantastic. Except you can't create a shortcut that only has a key plus Command. For instance, I wanted to bind "Find Previous" back to Command-D instead of Shift-Command-G, but it won't let me (function keys seem to work fine by themselves). So here's how to get around it:

  1. Add a new shortcut (say, Find Previous), and bind it to some similar key setup - say Shift-Command-D.
  2. Go into Terminal, and type open ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist (make it open -e... if you don't have the Dev Tools installed).
  3. Look for the setting NSUserKeyEquivalents, and open it.
  4. Find the shortcut you are interested in, and remove everything except the letter and the @ symbol and save your changes.
And there you go -- now the Keyboard Shortcut for "Find Previous" is Command-D.

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