Thursday 29 January 2009

Adding a shortcut key for Mail.app in OS X

At work I am forced to live with Microsoft Exchange and, consequently, Entourage on the Mac.

It's not the worst piece of software but I have now been trained to use CMD-Enter* as a shortcut for sending a composed message.

This only becomes a problem when I go to send a personal email using Mail.app. Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts to the rescue!

  • System preferences -> Keyboard & mouse.
  • Keyboard shortcuts.
  • Add application -> Mail.
  • Enter "Send" (without the quotes) as the menu item.
  • Enter your preferred shortcut.  (CMD-Enter* in this case).

On the next restart of Mail.app it will use the new shortcut.

*Where CMD is the ⌘ key.

4 comments:

  1. Christian Ross24 July 2009 at 11:41

    You sir, are a genius. Just made the switch from Entourage/Thunderbird and didn't like having to use cmd+shift+d to send a message.First round on me the next time we're in the same city.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,I know this is an older entry but hopefully you're still monitoring it. I'm brand new to Macs and come from using Ctrl+enter in every mail client I used on Windows. I was able to successfully change the shortcut key for sending mail in mail.app to Cmd+Enter and it works but at random sometimes, the shortcut key for sending just stops working and I get the little BONK noise to let me know that was I was attempting to do didn't work.Any ideas why this just decides to stop working sometimes?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have the same issue. It hasn't annoyed me enough to really piss me off yet and a restart always fixes the problem -- but I should probably take a deeper look into it.One day. :/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Earlier I was using it and it BONKED me a few times and then on the fourth or fifth time it sent just fine using Cmd+Enter. It's almost as if something else in mail is active therefore it can't send the email message. I don't know. You're right, it's not too annoying but I've done some Googling and haven't found an answer yet so I'll live it for now.

    ReplyDelete