Many Mac owners swear that keyboard shortcuts help simplify their lives. If you’re new to a Mac, learning all the available keyboard shortcuts can be a real challenge. Quite a few of these shortcuts will now work in iPadOS, too, thanks to the Magic Keyboard available to iPad Pro users.

We’ve put together a list of the most important shortcuts you should know in macOS. You can also take a look at our list of the best Mac apps for even more Apple shortcuts.

Open Spotlight

Capture custom screenshot

Define highlighted word

Restart your Mac (without confirmation dialog)

Empty Trash (opens confirmation dialog)

Open Preferences for the current app

Change volume in smaller increments

Change brightness in smaller increments

Very cool, but these shortcuts are just the tip of the iceberg. macOS comes loaded with other handy keyboard shortcuts that you can use to speed up your workflow and increase your productivity.

Before we dive straight into the comprehensive list, look below to find a table of the most useful shortcuts in a table of their own.

These keyboard shortcuts are major timesavers once you start implementing them in your daily tasks. They’re also pretty easy to learn and remember because the majority of the shortcuts use the first letter of the command. For example, command + Q = quit.

Once you get the keyboard shortcuts memorized, you’ll save tons of time in your word processing tasks like typing, copying, and pasting. If you’re frequently using Pages (Mac’s word processing program) or Google Docs on your Mac, then you’ll become more efficient since most of the shortcuts are consistent across applications. These handy shortcuts (along with the ones we mentioned earlier in this article) will help to simplify your workflow and improve your task-completion speed.

Other useful keyboard shortcuts for typing symbols and accents and other special characters are also available.

Note: Not all of these shortcuts work across the board; each application differs slightly. The Finder app is a great example of one of these. If you try the command, you’ll find that it does not work.

Keyboard shortcuts are available for anyone to use, but if you need more assistance using a computer, the Mac’s motor accessibility features can be enabled.