Keyboard shortcuts you may or may not know, and may or may not find useful…
Dot, dot, dot
Well, so I am apparently “a word nerd“. If you are the anal-retentive sort when it comes to typesetting (like I am), you’d be delighted to know that the keyboard shortcut to input the ellipsis (a.k.a. the “dot-dot-dot”) is OPTION+; (the semi-colon key)…
I em not a hyphen!
… oh, and the keyboard shortcut to input the em dash—which is all too often unfairly substituted by the hyphen—is OPTION+SHIFT+- (the hyphen key). The irony of it.
Spot the word
With OS X 10.5 Leopard, you can look up the definition of a word in Spotlight. Simply type a word and Spotlight will show a Definition result field in its pop-up window. Sometimes you don’t even have to click on the definition to see it in full. A great time-saver. I use this interchangeably with CONTROL+COMMAND+D. (Source: David Pogue, New York Times)
You do the math
Also, you can do simple calculations right inside Spotlight. (Source: David Pogue, New York Times)
Yes, I really do want to restart!
By holding down the OPTION key when you click on the Apple logo on the menu bar, ‘About This Mac’ becomes ‘System Profiler’ instead. Also, the ‘Restart’, ‘Shut Down’ and ‘Log Out’ commands lose their ellipses, meaning you won’t be presented with the two-minute confirmation dialog box…
…on the other hand, when you hold down the SHIFT key, ‘Force Quit’ loses its ellipsis and defaults to whichever application is currently in the foreground.
Now! Now!! Now!!!
And if you are the really impatient sort, COMMAND+CONTROL+EJECT (the eject key there at the top-rightmost corner of the keyboard) triggers an instant reboot, while COMMAND+CONTROL+OPTION+EJECT does an instant shutdown (these are for Intel Macs only).
In OS X 10.4 Tiger, holding the OPTION key down when clicking on the AirPort icon on the menu bar lets you see a list of available hotspots arranged by their signal strength, with the strongest at the top of the list. Now, in Leopard, an OPTION-click displays more information such as the MAC Address, SSID, RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) and Transmit Rate of the hotspot your Mac is connected to.
Slow motion
Still in awe of those silky-smooth animations in OS X? The next time you click on an icon in the Dock, or minimize a window, hold down the SHIFT key and watch the animation unfolds in slow motion. The details are stunning; if you SHIFT-minimize a QuickTime video, you’ll see that the video continues to play as its window is being animated. File this under ‘Really Useless Trivia’.
Your wish is my command…
Your Mac is secretly a puppy at heart, one that loves nothing more than having you issue it a spoken command. Go to Speech in System Preferences, and turn on ‘Speakable Items’. The next time the thought pops into your head, hold down the ESC key and ask “What time is it?”
… and your feedback is important to us
Conversely, you can have your Mac recite a passage back to you. If the ‘Speak selected text when the key is pressed’ option is checked in the Text To Speech preference pane, your Mac will recite any highlighted word or passage when you press a key—I use SHIFT+ESC so that I associate it with its Speech counterpart shortcut. Tip: use the ‘Alex’ system voice that is new in OS X Leopard; it is quite stunning, and is a far cry from the rest of the monosyllabic-sounding voices. ‘Alex’ actually takes an audible breath between sentences!
Going back and forth
I must admit I realized this one only quite recently: In the Finder, you can use COMMAND+[ and COMMAND+] to go back and forward as you navigate folders by keyboard. These two shortcuts are mostly system-wide, meaning they should work for most applications.
Jump the gun
In the Finder, you can quickly jump to the file you are looking for by typing the first few letters of its filename. I can usually manage three letters if I type really fast. Combine this with other Finder navigation shortcuts and you may never have to touch the mouse. (Windows users: this works for Windows Explorer, too.)
If you are a geek, you’d love this comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts by Dan Rodney or Apple’s official documentation on the keyboard shortcuts in OS X.
34, male and very Cancerian. Often irascible, even if he is prescient to his emotions. Lives for the resonance of beautiful passages, cinematic magic and aural bliss. Dabbles in 
Thanks for these! I knew a few of them but I’ve also just learned a whole loada stuff I didn’t know in the last 3 years. The ability to do dictionary definitions and calculations in spotlight is great! Though I’ve always used Quicksilver for that.
I always loved how most applications’ text input boxes respect the standard UNIX keyboard shortcuts like ctrl+a to jump to the start of a line and ctrl+e to jump to the end. Some, however, don’t seem to support this… not sure why. But I always thought it was a really nice touch.
Maybe it’s also worth mentioning an old chestnut that comes in handy sometimes… cmd+opt+esc to bring up the force quit applications menu.
[...] Tech – A tiny blip in the continuum: Useful and useless keyboard shortcuts in OS – The power of influence: Surprise, surprise. – Simple is the Reason of my Heart: OpenSocial: [...]
hey thanks! I like the command + [ or ] in Finder and the shift-slow mo thingy. Heh. I’m thinking of getting Leopard. But my budget is out of the window this month. Maybe I’ll buy it on a whim someday. :)