How to use your Mac (without a mouse)
This is a short helper guide for all those programmers out there who still find themselves taking their hands off their keyboard for most, if not all, navigational purposes. Your keyboard can be like the steering wheel of a car: most of the driving can be done without having to lift your hands off of it.
This should also come in handy if your mouse breaks or it’s bluetooth and out of batteries.
This is simply a quick-start guide focused on the programs and tools most used by developers(using Macs, of course). If you’re truly looking to ditch your mouse, you can even set your keyboard to control your cursor, although I wouldn’t bother without a number pad.
Symbol glossary: tab (⇥) / shift (⇧) / command (⌘) / control (⌃) / option (⌥)
The tab (⇥), shift (⇧), and command (⌘) keys will be your best friends.
Note: this tutorial is being written on Mac laptop running OS 10.13.6. I reference Chrome Version 83.0.4103.61, VS Code version 1.45.1. Keyboard shortcuts differ from OS to OS (rarely) browser to browser (although there are some consistencies) and editor to editor.
Getting Started:
Turn on your computer. After it finishes booting up, you’ll see your user login options, typically your user login and a guest login. Don’t touch that mouse!
Press an arrow key. You’ll see your avatar emphasized. Press enter again and a login text field will appear. Enter you password and press enter. You’re in!
The desktop:
Don’t touch that mouse! Most likely you’re looking to open an application; an internet browser, perhaps? Whatever it is can likely be opened using Apple’s Spotlight tool. To access it, press ⌘+space bar. In the text field, type the name of the application, for example, iTerm. Now your terminal emulator is open! You likely won’t be tempted to use your mouse in there, so I’ll move on. Let’s open your text editor. Using spotlight, let’s open VS Code.
VS Code:
By default, VS Code will open to the directory and/or file you were working on when you quit your last session. If you want to navigate to a new file within the parent directory, press ⇧⌘E. (The same keyboard shortcut will also return focus to the editor window) This still change highlighter focus to the Explorer panel. Press the up and down arrow keys to switch between directories, and left and right arrow keys to open and close directories (directories can also be opened and closed with the space bar). When you’ve found the file you’d like to edit, press space bar to open it in the editor.
Want to access the terminal within VS code? Perhaps you’d like to minimize it to save screen space for the editor window. You can toggle the terminal open and close by pressing ⌃`(that second charcter is the backtick).
Let’s say you’re editing multiple files at once, an HTML, CSS and JavaScript file. To switch between the file tabs in the editor, hold down ⌃ and press ⇥ to cycle through the tabs. Let go of ⌃ to select the desired file. You can even switch the direction of the cycling by holding down both ⌃ and ⇧.
While you’re in the editor, two very helpful keys are the ⇧ and fn keys. Instead of relying on the arrow keys to step single space at a time left or right, hold down the fn key and press the left or right arrows to go the end or beginning of a text line. If you have a lengthy text file, you can hold down the fn key and press the up and down arrows to bring the cursor to the top or the bottom of the page, respectively.
Did you know you highlight a specific set of characters using the ⇧ and arrow keys? To highlight a whole line, hold both the fn key and the ⇧ key and press an arrow key. Left and right will select the whole line in that direction. Up and down will select whole paragraphs. No need to click and drag the cursor!
The Browser:
Uh oh. The Browser. Going to need to start clicking that mouse, right? Wrong! Let’s open chrome (Spotlight in the spotlight again). Chrome will automatically focus on the address bar, which also handily functions as a search bar. Admittedly, the keyboard shortcuts for navigating search results are clunky: use tab and ⇧tab to change focus on clickable items (one goes forward, the other goes backward). Press enter when the focus is on the title of the desired search result. On any webpage, as long as your focus is on the page window itself, the arrow keys will navigate through the page.
If you want to inspect the page in the dev tools: ⌥⌘C. For the browser console: ⌥⌘J.
Got a lot of tabs open? Press a number that corresponds to the desired tab (left to right order) while holding ⌘. Alternatively, you can iterate through the tabs by holding ⌃ and pressing tab; or for the other direction, holding ⌃⇧ and then tab for each “step”. By the way, the keyboard shortcuts for tab “scrolling” are fairly consistent across programs that use tabs.
Now that you have multiple applications open on your desktop, you can ⌘tab or ⌘⌃tab to cycle through each open program.
Misc:
Generally, ⌘W closes tabs or windows, ⌘O prompts your program to open a new file, and ⌘Q quits programs.
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