Option key tricks

[procrastopossum]

I consider myself a keyboard tricks master, but Matt Birchler’s new video on option key shortcuts still taught me some neat little things. So I thought I’d share:

This key on your Mac unlocks so much power

I also liked this trick from the comments that I’d somehow never thought to do, since I rarely need special characters:

Normally opt-[key] would type out special characters like ç. I don’t really need those, so I created a custom Mac input option that clears out all default opt-[key] shortcuts so I can remap them in Raycast. For example, opt-N opens up my notes. It’s really convenient to not think about which combination of finger gymnastics is still unoccupied and instead just use opt for all my shortcuts.

[sridhar]

Now that we are talking about single key tricks, here a couple of custom ones I’ve set up which I find invaluable:

Left ⌃: mouse click
Right ⌘: ⌘␣ (brings up launcher, Raycast)
Right ⌥: ⌘⇥ (to quickly switch between the last 2 used apps)

I used BetterTouchTool to set these up.