I’ve been tasked with creating a new program to go onto the Apple Store. I’ve never been a Mac user and probably never will be, but since I have to use it for now, it’s really helpful to know how to get around on one. In order to do things faster, I try to keep from going back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse. However if I want to do that, I need to know all the keyboard commands that I normally use on a Microsoft Windows computer. The first confusing thing that I ran into was the funny symbols the Mac OS uses to define special keys. The most notable ones are the control, option and command symbols. Now on the MacBook Pro that I’m currently using, the command symbol is on the command key, so it’s easy to see that the symbol goes with that key. However, the option symbol and the control symbol are not on their respective keys so I had to ask Google about them. A quick search led me to Ted Wise’s page: http://tedwise.com/2009/04/28/what-do-those-weird-mac-symbols-mean/, which was very helpful.
When I found out what the symbols meant, I was able to come up with the following table of the shortcut keys that help me navigate and use Xcode 4 quickly. I know there are a lot of pages out there that list shortcut keys, but they seem to be huge and also list a ton that I’ll never use. This list is meant to be a sub-set of those that I use on a daily basis. The list might be small for now, but I’ll be sure to add other helpful ones in the future.
| Shortcut |
Description |
| ⌘ + / |
Comment or uncomment section |
| ⌘ + C |
Copy |
| ⌃ + I |
Correct selection indentation |
| fn + Delete |
Delete text that is ahead of the cursor |
| ⌃ + A + K + K |
Delete entire line |
| ⌘ + → |
End |
| ⌘ + F |
Find |
 +  + ⌘ + ← |
Fold methods and functions |
| ⌘ + + Esc |
Force close an application |
| ⌘ + ← |
Home |
| ⌘ + ] |
Indent the selected text |
| ⌘ + V |
Paste |
| ⌘ + Z |
Undo |
| + + ⌘ + → |
Unfold methods and functions |
Last edited: June 28, 2012
