CMD+K search in Safari
Firefox keyboard shortcuts are permanently etched into my head. Blame my many years of Windows usage for my dependancy on CTRL+K or CMD+K to focus on the search bar at the top right corner of my favorite browser. It would be only natural to restore the CMD+K search goodness.
- Open System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard shortcuts
- Select the add button at the bottom left corner
- Select Safari from the applications drop down menu
- For menu title, enter “Google Search…” ( … = option + ; )
- Focus on the Keyboard Shortcut textbox and press CMD+K
- Select ‘Add’ and restart Safari
There’s no denying the convenience of CMD+K over the default CMD+Shift+L. Does anyone feel like an argument?
Check out a previous post on breathing new life into Safari for inspiration on adding additional functionality to Apple’s Safari browser.
Discuss - 20 Comments
Cool! It took me a while to understand what you meant by option + ; outputs the ellipses “…” hehe. Thanks! P.S. How does this work?
[…] Firefox converts may enjoy this short tutorial on adding a custom keyboard shortcut to Safari which adds the familiar CMD+K shortcut to focus on the browsers search bar. […]
I tried doing this and can’t get it to work
I followed the above instructions.
Was I meant to enter exactly this Google Search… (… = option +
as the menu title?
I tried the above and just couldnt get it to work, LOVE the idea though.
Sorry, the correct title is Google Search… See the post for clarification. During my database import the correct characters were stripped and replaced which is probably the reason for the problem.
[…] Jealous that Firefox users enjoy a CMD+K shortcut to jump straight to their search box? Safari users can achieve the same keyboard shortcut convenience with a little System Preference tweaking. Simply follow the previously mentioned steps below: […]
I never use that due to the fact that you can just type the seach you want into the address bar which you can do by merely hitting Fn6 which works just fine and dandy on my mac
As I’m pretty stupid, I figured I’d post an answer to clear it up for people that don’t quite get it either.
I wasn’t really paying attention and tried to enter “Google Search…†(… = option + ;
but whatever.
For title you want to enter
Google Search
and then hold option and press ; to get the …
so it will look like “Google Search…” but you can’t just type the ellipsis.
Or, you could put this into the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUserKeyEquivalents ‘{“Google Search…”=”@k”;}’
Which is much quicker.
For those interested, I wrote a blog post about adding keyboard shortcuts from the command line. You can read it here.
Also, I find that Cmd-Shift-R makes a good key combo for reopen all windows from last session.
MacTipper
My Mac-Tipping Blog
this is awesome thank you so much, the last little thing i miss about firefox when running safari and you’ve found it
its Google Search and to get 3 dots you have to hold option or alt key and press ; or semi colon
I know this is from back in 2006, but it’s still helping people today! Thanks for the tip!
Hello thanks for the tip. I had some problems at first because I use the Swedish version of Safari. What you have to do if you’re using a non-English version is this:
Open the “edit” menu, scroll down to “search” to expand that and then type in your language’s equivalent of “Google Search…” into system preferences.
Your hint helped me a lot!
Was wondering why nothing wanted to work and then I corrected the entry for my German system to “Google-Suche …”
Now everything is up and running. Had to change that, because I now have to work with a mac and a pc
Sweet tip! Thanks.
Thank you for this tip.
Hey just wanted to say thanks!
I thought three ‘.’ would do the trick but they didn’t… Thanks for the tip. Still helpful after all these years.
By the way, congratulations for the blog. It looks really nice.
Anybody got an idea how to make this work with Safari 5.1?
This still works in Safari 5.1 on OS X Lion for me. I did a clean install of Lion and forgot about this shortcut. I just setup the shortcut via System Preferences > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts > Safari. Use the same Google Search… + CMD + K keyboard shortcut.
Awesome thanks!!
thanks….I’ve got Firefox burned into my brain as well…