The Only OS X Shortcut You Need to Remember

[onedognight]

Except in Firefox which redirects to the Mozilla website instead.

[raganwald]

Yes, I detest applications that decide to do their own "cross-platform" thing instead of integrating smoothly with the environment's native behaviour.

[mr_november]

Cmd + tab (cycling b/w open apps) and Cmd + ` (cycling b/w open windows of app with focus) are definitely my 2 most-used shortcuts.

[X-Istence]

Do note that is actually supposed to be Cmd + ` (the same button as the ~, and not single quotation mark)

[pak]

Except in Office 2008, where Cmd-‘ is broken! If they didn't fix that in 2011, I am going to switch to OO.o out of spite.

[kaffeinecoma]

I'm a fan of Cmd + , which opens the Preferences dialog.

[doublegee]

Shift + CMD + / doesn't work for Textmate, it says "Warning: On Leopard the menu item searching is prone to crashing, so we have disabled the key equivalent. Sorry about the inconvenience."

[diskrete]

I get the same thing, and I am using Snow Leopard. (Even though the message references Leopard.) 10.6.4, TextMate 1.5.10.

[quiesce]

It works fine for me in 10.6.4

[siddhant]

Without a third party plugin, I can only think of Spotlight, which turns out to be good enough.

[mmphosis]

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts > All Applications > Show Help menu > Command Shift /

?

[te_chris]

one which i stumbled upon by accident is pressing option when you're in a menu. e.g the apple menu at the top of the screen: If you press option while you're looking at this menu certain menu items change - in this case about this mac becomes system profiler. Also if you press shift in this situation force quite becomes force quit active application.

[epo]

Metadata searches are cool though I haven't found a comprehensive description, e.g. type name:foo to find all objects with foo in the name, kind:pdf wil find all PDFs. These may be combined, e.g. name:foo kind:pdf has the expected result.

[stretchwithme]

And from there, the right arrow key takes you to all the system menu items.

[il]

Shift + CMD + /? Three button shortcut for help? What happened to F1 being the universal help key?

[ugh]

⌘? displays help. That other shortcut only opens the help menu.

[codesink]

Brilliant, with Chrome and Safari you can use it to search and open any bookmarked page.

[parenthesis]

Use ctrl+F2 and then the arrow keys and return to select menu items.

[shabble]

   M-? is undefined

[J3L2404]

Cmd + Space for Spotlight search box is very handy.

[makecheck]

I find myself using the Spotlight box for things I wouldn't have guessed...like looking up words in the dictionary, or doing math.

[ugh]

Besides its capabilities as a launcher, Spotlight is also a very capable calculator. Stuff like sqrt(2pi^e) works, oh, and Cmd+C works for the results, too. Someone was really sweating the details on that one.

[rapind]

Yup that's the only way I launch anything.

[jodrellblank]

When I Spotlight for "Applications" meaning "the folder with all my applications in it", instead it finds (only) a folder named Applications somewhere deep in the XCode example code with sod all in it.

Any ideas how to get it to do what I want instead of something else? (or at least, also do what I want).

[Hates_]

I'm still hooked on Launchbar.

[Groxx]

I map it to F12 (and dashboard to cmd+F12, as I rarely use it). Physical similarity with the spotlight icon's location, and lets me map cmd+space to changing input methods (ie, switching to 日本語).

[gregparadee]

I agree, I use this for pretty much everything.

[SoftwareMaven]

I keep going back and forth between the Google Quick Search and Spotlight as my Cmd + Space shortcut.

[albemuth]

too slow, quiksilver or alfred ftw

[proles]

ios does it with the search bar in safari, but it'd be nice if spotlight would also let you search the current document, search the web, etc. all with a simple command+spacebar.