How to create a keyboard shortcut on Mac for any menu command
macOS ships a feature that lets you bolt a keyboard shortcut onto almost any command in almost any app, and hardly anyone uses it — mostly because the one thing it demands, you can get wrong in a way that fails silently. Here is how to create a keyboard shortcut on Mac properly: the steps, the exact rules the Menu title field enforces, worked examples worth stealing, and an honest note on where the whole mechanism runs out of road.
How to create a keyboard shortcut on Mac
The feature is called App Shortcuts, and it lives further down System Settings than you'd guess.
- Open System Settings → Keyboard, then click Keyboard Shortcuts…
- Select App Shortcuts in the sidebar.
- Click +.
- In Application, pick a specific app — or All Applications.
- In Menu title, type the command exactly as it appears in that app's menu bar.
- Click Keyboard shortcut, press the combination you want, and click Done.
Open the app's menu and the shortcut is now printed next to the command, as though the developer had put it there. That's the whole trick: you aren't recording a macro, you're telling macOS "when this menu item exists, give it this key."
The rules nobody tells you
The title must match character for character. Not "close to", not "the
gist of". If the menu says Paste and Match Style, then Paste & Match Style
does nothing at all. Case counts. Trailing punctuation counts.
Ellipses are one character, not three periods. A menu item like
Save As… ends in a real ellipsis. Type Save As... and you've typed a
different string. On a US layout, ⌥ + ; produces …. The easiest way to
be sure is to copy the title straight out of the app when you can.
Submenus use ->, with no spaces. Apple's own example: to reach
Format → Font → Ligatures → Use Default in TextEdit, you type
Format->Font->Ligatures->Use Default. Each -> is a hyphen and a
greater-than sign — you're writing a path through the menu hierarchy, and
every level has to be spelled exactly right.
"All Applications" is usually the right choice. It doesn't force the
command on apps that lack it; it just applies wherever that exact menu item
turns up. One Merge All Windows entry covers Finder, Safari and everything
else that offers it.
Some shortcuts will quietly refuse to work. Four common reasons:
- The app already uses that combination for something else. The app wins.
- macOS already uses it system-wide. The system wins.
- The menu item isn't there, or is greyed out, in the context you're testing.
- The app doesn't use real macOS menus. Electron apps, cross-platform toolkits and anything drawing its own UI can ignore App Shortcuts entirely.
There's no error message for any of these. If the shortcut doesn't appear beside the command when you open the menu, the title didn't match or the app isn't cooperating — those are the only two outcomes.
Worked examples worth stealing
| What you want | Application | Menu title to type | Suggested shortcut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paste without dragging formatting in | All Applications | Paste and Match Style | ⌘⇧V |
| Save As…, which most apps hide behind Option | All Applications | Save As… | ⌘⇧S |
| Grow a window to its "natural" size | All Applications | Zoom | ⌃⌥Z |
| Collapse a pile of windows into tabs | All Applications | Merge All Windows | ⌃⌥M |
| Send the front window to the left half | All Applications | Window->Move & Resize->Left | ⌃⌥← |
| Empty the Trash without the mouse | Finder | Empty Trash… | ⌃⌥⌫ |
Pick a modifier pattern and stick to it. ⌃⌥ plus a letter is a good
neighbourhood — it's crowded enough to be memorable, empty enough that you
rarely collide with an app's own bindings.
Where App Shortcuts stop
Apple is unusually blunt about the limit: you can create keyboard shortcuts only for existing menu commands. That single sentence is the ceiling, and it has three practical consequences.
You can't launch anything. There is no menu item for "open Slack", so there's no App Shortcut for it either. Launching apps from the keyboard is a separate job with separate tools.
You can't reshape a key. App Shortcuts bind combinations to commands; they don't change what a key is. Swapping Caps Lock, or fixing a PC keyboard's modifier order, is key remapping, which lives in a different pane.
And you only get the layouts Apple shipped. That Window->Move & Resize
example is the interesting one, because it's the closest thing to free window
management on this list — and it stops immediately. You get halves, quarters
and a handful of pairs, in apps that ship a standard Window menu. No thirds.
No two-thirds. No custom regions. No "the left 40% of my ultrawide". If you
want those, no amount of App Shortcut plumbing will produce them, because the
menu item you'd need doesn't exist. That's the point where a real tiler
earns its keep: Let's Tile drops a visible grid over the front
window and lets you steer to any cell with the arrow keys, so there's no
menu-item ceiling and nothing per-app to configure.
The same gap shows up in switching. There's no menu command for "go to the Chrome window I was in two windows ago", so there's nothing to bind — which is why Let's Switch exists as a separate layer rather than a clever App Shortcut. Both are free to use, and neither needs an account.
Frequently asked questions
Do App Shortcuts survive an app update? Usually. They're matched by menu title, so they keep working until the developer renames the command — at which point yours silently stops firing. If a favourite shortcut dies after an update, check the menu wording first.
Can I override an app's own shortcut? Often, yes. Assign the app's existing combination to a different menu item and macOS generally honours your entry. It's the reliable way to move a command you keep hitting by accident.
Where do these get stored? Per user, in macOS's preferences — so they're yours, not the app's, and they don't travel with the app to another Mac.
Is there a faster way to find the exact title?
Open the menu and read it, or use Help → search in the app's menu bar, which
shows the full path to any command including its submenus. That path is
exactly what you retype with -> between the levels.
If you'd rather start from what macOS already gives you before adding your own, our Mac window shortcuts cheat sheet lists every built-in one — and where each stops.