Mac menus are often referred to as pull-down menus. To check out the OS X menus, click the Finder button in the Dock to activate the Finder and then look at the top of your screen. From left to right, you see the Apple menu, the Finder menu, and six other menus. To use an OS X menu, click its name to make the menu appear and then pull (drag) down to select a menu item. Piece of cake!
Ever since Mac OS 8, menus stay down after you click their names until you either select an item or click outside a menu’s boundaries.
Figure 2-8 shows the menu bars for the Finder, TextEdit, and Preview applications.
An easy way to tell which program is active is to look at the application menu — it’s the leftmost menu with a name, just to the right of the • menu. When you’re in the Finder, of course, the application menu reads Finder. But if you switch to another program (by clicking its icon in the Dock or by clicking any window associated with the program) or launch a new program, that menu changes to the name of the active program.
When you have an application open, the commands on the menu change, too — but just a little bit. What makes this cool is that you have access to some standard application menu items whether you’re running Mail or Safari. For example, most (but not all) applications have Cut, Copy, and Paste commands in their Edit menus, and Open, Save, and Print commands in their File menus. You can find much more about commands for applications in Part III, which explains how applications that come with OS X Mavericks can help you get things you want to do done.
Shortcut menus (also known as contextual menus) list commands that apply only to the item that is currently selected. Shortcut menus might be available in windows, on icons, and in most places on the Desktop.
To use them, you either hold down the Control key and click — which you can call a Control-click to sound cool to your Mac friends — or, if your mouse has two or more buttons, right-click.
Most Mac laptops (as well as the Magic Trackpad and the Magic Mouse) let you click the trackpad using two fingers to simulate a right-click or Controlclick.
If this doesn’t work for you, make sure the Secondary Click check box is enabled in the Two Fingers section of the Trackpad System Preference pane.
Actions appear in shortcut menus only if they make sense for the item that you Control-click or right-click. (That’s why people call ’em shortcuts! They stick to the immediate context.) Figure 2-9 shows the shortcut menu that appears when you Control-click (or right-click) a document icon on the left and the shortcut menu for the Desktop on the right.
Shortcut menus are also available in most applications. Open your favorite app and try Control-clicking to find out whether those menus are there. In most cases, using a shortcut menu is a quick way to avoid going to the menu bar to choose a command. In some programs — such as iMovie, iTunes, and many more — shortcut menus are the only way to access some commands.
To make the Finder-related shortcut menus available to users who didn’t have the foresight to purchase this book, Apple added the Actions button to the toolbar. As a result, people who don’t know about Control-clicking or right-clicking (or have only one free hand) can access most shortcut menus by clicking the Actions button and displaying its shortcut menu. You, on the other hand, gentle reader, know how to get at these commands without having to run your mouse all the way up to the Action button in the toolbar, plus a handful of commands appear in the Control-click/right-click shortcut menu that don’t appear in the Actions button/menu.
I’m a big fan of multibutton mice, and shortcut menus are a huge reason for this preference. Fortunately, Apple now includes multibutton mice with all its desktop computers (except the Mac mini, which doesn’t include a mouse, keyboard, or monitor). You may have to enable it. If you have an older Mac with a single-button mouse, you may want to replace that mouse with one that offers you at least two buttons. With a multibutton mouse, you need only one hand to access these beautiful little shortcut menus.
Get in the habit of Control-clicking (or right-clicking or two-finger clicking) items on your screen. Before you know it, using shortcut menus will become second nature to you.
Menu items that appear in black on a menu are currently available. Menu items that aren’t currently available are grayed out, meaning that they’re disabled for the time being. You can’t select a disabled menu item.
In Figure 2-10, the File menu on the left is pulled down while nothing is selected in the Finder; this is why many of the menu items are disabled (in gray). These items are disabled because an item (such as a window or icon) must be selected for you to use one of these menu items. For example, the Show Original command is grayed out because it works only if the selected item is an alias. On the right side of Figure 2-10, I selected a document before I pulled down the menu; notice that many of the formerly disabled commands are enabled when an icon is selected. (The Show Original command is still grayed out because the selected icon is not an alias.)
Finally, notice that items that end in an ellipsis (. . .), such as the Burn “I Am a Document.png” to Disc command in Figure 2-10, will open a dialog with additional options.
Some menu items have more menus attached to them, and these are called submenus — menus that are subordinate to a menu item. If a menu has a black triangle to the right of its name, it has a submenu.
To use a submenu, click a menu name once (to drop the menu down) and then slide your cursor down to any item with a black triangle. When the item is highlighted, move your mouse to the right just slightly. The submenu should pop out of the original menu’s item, as shown in Figure 2-11.
On the far-left side of the menu bar sits a little •, which, if you click it, actually displays a menu. No matter what application is active, the • menu is always available in the top-left corner of your menu bar.
The menu bar is always available, even with apps that hide it in full-screen mode. To make it reappear, move your cursor to the top of the screen, wait a second or two, and watch the menu bar magically reappear.
From top to bottom, the • menu gives you a number of options, including the following:
✓ About This Mac: Choose this item to see what version of OS X you’re running, what kind of Mac and processor you’re using, how much memory your Mac has, and the name of your Startup Disk. The window that appears also sports a Get Info button that will launch the Apple System Information utility; there, you can find out more than you’ll probably ever want or need to know about your Mac’s hardware and software.
If you click the version number in this window, it changes to the build number (Apple’s internal tracking number for versions). If you click the build number in this window, it changes to the serial number of your Mac. Finally, if you click the serial number of your Mac in this window, it changes to the version number again. This interesting effect is shown in Figure 2-12.
✓ Software Update: If you’re connected to the Internet, choose this item to have your Mac check with the mothership (Apple) to see whether any updates are available for OS X, its included applications, other Apple-branded applications such as iPhoto, Final Cut Pro, Pages, or even Apple-branded peripheral devices, such as the iPod or iPhone.
✓ App Store: Choose this item to launch the Mac App Store.
✓ System Preferences: Choose this item to open the System Preferences window (which I discuss further in Chapter 3 and elsewhere).
✓ Dock (submenu): This lets you mess with options for the Dock. Scour Chapter 4 for more info on the Dock.
✓ Recent Items: This lets you quickly access applications, documents, and servers you’ve used recently, as shown earlier in Figure 2-11.
✓ Force Quit: Use this option only in emergencies. What’s an emergency? Use it when an application becomes recalcitrant or otherwise misbehaves or refuses to quit when you say Quit.
Memorize the keyboard shortcut for Force Quit (⌘+Option+Power Button). Sometimes a program gets so badly hosed that you can’t click anywhere and other keyboard shortcuts won’t do anything at all. It doesn’t happen often, nor does it happen to everyone. If it should happen to you, calmly press the magic key combo you memorized (⌘+Option+power button), and the Force Quit Applications dialog (usually) appears. Click the name of the program that’s acting up and then click the Force Quit button or press the Return or Enter key to make the balky application stop balking.
The reason Force Quit should be used only in an emergency is that if you use it on an application that’s working fine and have any unsaved documents, your work since the last time you saved the file will be blown away.
Or not. The Auto Save and Versions features, which first appeared in Lion, are still the default for Apple’s own applications. You’ll hear more about these features in Chapter 6; if the app you’re using supports Auto Save features, you shouldn’t lose any (or at least not much) of your work regardless of when you last saved.
✓ Shut Down options: These four commands do exactly what their names imply:
✓ Keyboard shortcuts are shown in menus. For example, Figure 2-10 shows that the keyboard shortcut for the Print command appears on the menu after the words Print: ⌘+P. Any menu item with one of these pretzel-symbol+letter combinations after its name can be executed with that keyboard shortcut. Just hold down the ⌘ key and press the letter shown in the menu — N for New Finder Window, F for Find, and so on — and the appropriate command executes.
✓ Capital letters don’t mean that you have to press Shift as part of the shortcut. Although the letters next to the ⌘ symbol in the Finder menus are indeed capitals, they just identify the letter on the keyboard. For example, if you see ⌘+P, just hold down the ⌘ key and then press P. Some programs have keyboard combinations that require the use of ⌘ and the Shift key, but those programs tell you so by calling the key combination something like ⇧+⌘+S or ⇧+⌘+O. (Look at the Empty Trash shortcut in Figure 2-13 to see one of these up-facing arrows in its natural environment.)
✓ Recognize the funky-looking Option-key symbol. You’ll see one other symbol sometimes used in keyboard shortcuts: It represents the Option key (sometimes abbreviated in keyboard shortcuts as Opt and, on some keyboards, also labeled Alt). Check it out next to the Hide Others command, shown in Figure 2-13.
What this freakish symbol means in the Finder menu item (Hide Others in Figure 2-13) is that if you hold down both the Option and the ⌘ keys as you press the H key, all applications other than the Finder will be hidden.
✓ Okay, there was more than one more symbol. Occasionally, you’ll see a caret (^) used as the symbol for the Control key.
✓ If it makes sense, it’s probably a shortcut. Most keyboard shortcuts have a mnemonic relationship with their names. For example, the following table shows some of the basic keyboard shortcuts.
Ever since Mac OS 8, menus stay down after you click their names until you either select an item or click outside a menu’s boundaries.
The ever-changing menu bar
Before you start working with OS X menus, you really, really should know this about menus in general: They can change unexpectedly. Why? Well, the menus you see on the menu bar at the top of the screen always reflect the program that’s active at the time. When you switch from the Finder to a particular program — or from one program to another — the menus change immediately to match whatever program you switched to.Figure 2-8 shows the menu bars for the Finder, TextEdit, and Preview applications.
An easy way to tell which program is active is to look at the application menu — it’s the leftmost menu with a name, just to the right of the • menu. When you’re in the Finder, of course, the application menu reads Finder. But if you switch to another program (by clicking its icon in the Dock or by clicking any window associated with the program) or launch a new program, that menu changes to the name of the active program.
When you have an application open, the commands on the menu change, too — but just a little bit. What makes this cool is that you have access to some standard application menu items whether you’re running Mail or Safari. For example, most (but not all) applications have Cut, Copy, and Paste commands in their Edit menus, and Open, Save, and Print commands in their File menus. You can find much more about commands for applications in Part III, which explains how applications that come with OS X Mavericks can help you get things you want to do done.
To use them, you either hold down the Control key and click — which you can call a Control-click to sound cool to your Mac friends — or, if your mouse has two or more buttons, right-click.
Most Mac laptops (as well as the Magic Trackpad and the Magic Mouse) let you click the trackpad using two fingers to simulate a right-click or Controlclick.
If this doesn’t work for you, make sure the Secondary Click check box is enabled in the Two Fingers section of the Trackpad System Preference pane.
Actions appear in shortcut menus only if they make sense for the item that you Control-click or right-click. (That’s why people call ’em shortcuts! They stick to the immediate context.) Figure 2-9 shows the shortcut menu that appears when you Control-click (or right-click) a document icon on the left and the shortcut menu for the Desktop on the right.
Shortcut menus are also available in most applications. Open your favorite app and try Control-clicking to find out whether those menus are there. In most cases, using a shortcut menu is a quick way to avoid going to the menu bar to choose a command. In some programs — such as iMovie, iTunes, and many more — shortcut menus are the only way to access some commands.
I’m a big fan of multibutton mice, and shortcut menus are a huge reason for this preference. Fortunately, Apple now includes multibutton mice with all its desktop computers (except the Mac mini, which doesn’t include a mouse, keyboard, or monitor). You may have to enable it. If you have an older Mac with a single-button mouse, you may want to replace that mouse with one that offers you at least two buttons. With a multibutton mouse, you need only one hand to access these beautiful little shortcut menus.
Get in the habit of Control-clicking (or right-clicking or two-finger clicking) items on your screen. Before you know it, using shortcut menus will become second nature to you.
In Figure 2-10, the File menu on the left is pulled down while nothing is selected in the Finder; this is why many of the menu items are disabled (in gray). These items are disabled because an item (such as a window or icon) must be selected for you to use one of these menu items. For example, the Show Original command is grayed out because it works only if the selected item is an alias. On the right side of Figure 2-10, I selected a document before I pulled down the menu; notice that many of the formerly disabled commands are enabled when an icon is selected. (The Show Original command is still grayed out because the selected icon is not an alias.)
To use a submenu, click a menu name once (to drop the menu down) and then slide your cursor down to any item with a black triangle. When the item is highlighted, move your mouse to the right just slightly. The submenu should pop out of the original menu’s item, as shown in Figure 2-11.
The menu bar is always available, even with apps that hide it in full-screen mode. To make it reappear, move your cursor to the top of the screen, wait a second or two, and watch the menu bar magically reappear.
From top to bottom, the • menu gives you a number of options, including the following:
✓ About This Mac: Choose this item to see what version of OS X you’re running, what kind of Mac and processor you’re using, how much memory your Mac has, and the name of your Startup Disk. The window that appears also sports a Get Info button that will launch the Apple System Information utility; there, you can find out more than you’ll probably ever want or need to know about your Mac’s hardware and software.
If you click the version number in this window, it changes to the build number (Apple’s internal tracking number for versions). If you click the build number in this window, it changes to the serial number of your Mac. Finally, if you click the serial number of your Mac in this window, it changes to the version number again. This interesting effect is shown in Figure 2-12.
✓ App Store: Choose this item to launch the Mac App Store.
✓ System Preferences: Choose this item to open the System Preferences window (which I discuss further in Chapter 3 and elsewhere).
✓ Dock (submenu): This lets you mess with options for the Dock. Scour Chapter 4 for more info on the Dock.
✓ Recent Items: This lets you quickly access applications, documents, and servers you’ve used recently, as shown earlier in Figure 2-11.
✓ Force Quit: Use this option only in emergencies. What’s an emergency? Use it when an application becomes recalcitrant or otherwise misbehaves or refuses to quit when you say Quit.
Memorize the keyboard shortcut for Force Quit (⌘+Option+Power Button). Sometimes a program gets so badly hosed that you can’t click anywhere and other keyboard shortcuts won’t do anything at all. It doesn’t happen often, nor does it happen to everyone. If it should happen to you, calmly press the magic key combo you memorized (⌘+Option+power button), and the Force Quit Applications dialog (usually) appears. Click the name of the program that’s acting up and then click the Force Quit button or press the Return or Enter key to make the balky application stop balking.
The reason Force Quit should be used only in an emergency is that if you use it on an application that’s working fine and have any unsaved documents, your work since the last time you saved the file will be blown away.
Or not. The Auto Save and Versions features, which first appeared in Lion, are still the default for Apple’s own applications. You’ll hear more about these features in Chapter 6; if the app you’re using supports Auto Save features, you shouldn’t lose any (or at least not much) of your work regardless of when you last saved.
✓ Shut Down options: These four commands do exactly what their names imply:
- Sleep: Puts your Mac into an energy-efficient state of suspended animation. See the section about Energy Saver in Chapter 17 for details on the Energy Saver System Preference pane and sleeping.
- Restart: Quits all open programs and restarts your Mac. It’s quite polite about this task, asking if you want to save any unsaved changes in open documents before complying.
- Shut Down: Turns off your Mac. Refer to Chapter 1 for details.
- Log Out: Quits all open programs and logs you out. Again, your Mac will be ever so polite, asking if you want to save unsaved changes in open documents before complying. When it’s done, the login screen appears.
Most menu items, or at least the most common ones, have keyboard shortcuts to help you quickly navigate your Mac without having to haggle so much with the mouse. Using these key combinations activates menu items without using the mouse; to use them, you press the Command (⌘) key and then press another key (or keys) without releasing the ⌘ key. Memorize the shortcuts that you use often.
You’ll learn how to change keyboard shortcuts and even how to create ones of your own, but not until the next chapter (Chapter 3).
Some people refer to the Command key as the Apple key. That’s because on many keyboards that key has both the pretzel-like Command-key symbol (⌘) and an Apple logo (•) on it. To avoid confusion, I always refer to ⌘ as the Command key.
You’ll learn how to change keyboard shortcuts and even how to create ones of your own, but not until the next chapter (Chapter 3).
Some people refer to the Command key as the Apple key. That’s because on many keyboards that key has both the pretzel-like Command-key symbol (⌘) and an Apple logo (•) on it. To avoid confusion, I always refer to ⌘ as the Command key.
Here are five things that will give you a handle on keyboard shortcuts:
✓ Keyboard shortcuts are shown in menus. For example, Figure 2-10 shows that the keyboard shortcut for the Print command appears on the menu after the words Print: ⌘+P. Any menu item with one of these pretzel-symbol+letter combinations after its name can be executed with that keyboard shortcut. Just hold down the ⌘ key and press the letter shown in the menu — N for New Finder Window, F for Find, and so on — and the appropriate command executes.
✓ Capital letters don’t mean that you have to press Shift as part of the shortcut. Although the letters next to the ⌘ symbol in the Finder menus are indeed capitals, they just identify the letter on the keyboard. For example, if you see ⌘+P, just hold down the ⌘ key and then press P. Some programs have keyboard combinations that require the use of ⌘ and the Shift key, but those programs tell you so by calling the key combination something like ⇧+⌘+S or ⇧+⌘+O. (Look at the Empty Trash shortcut in Figure 2-13 to see one of these up-facing arrows in its natural environment.)
✓ Recognize the funky-looking Option-key symbol. You’ll see one other symbol sometimes used in keyboard shortcuts: It represents the Option key (sometimes abbreviated in keyboard shortcuts as Opt and, on some keyboards, also labeled Alt). Check it out next to the Hide Others command, shown in Figure 2-13.
What this freakish symbol means in the Finder menu item (Hide Others in Figure 2-13) is that if you hold down both the Option and the ⌘ keys as you press the H key, all applications other than the Finder will be hidden.
✓ Okay, there was more than one more symbol. Occasionally, you’ll see a caret (^) used as the symbol for the Control key.
✓ If it makes sense, it’s probably a shortcut. Most keyboard shortcuts have a mnemonic relationship with their names. For example, the following table shows some of the basic keyboard shortcuts.
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