How to Use a Mac Without a Mouse

The short answer. A Mac is fully operable from the keyboard, but not out of the box: one setting has to be turned on first, and two jobs need a utility before they stop being painful. Turn on Full Keyboard Access so Tab reaches every control; learn the menu bar, Dock and window shortcuts; then add a launcher for apps and a window manager for layout. Everything else — text editing, dialogs, browsing, the Finder — already works, and has since long before anyone thought to write a guide about it.

This guide covers the setup, the shortcuts worth memorising, and where the keyboard genuinely runs out.

Step 1: turn on Full Keyboard Access

This is the setting almost everyone misses, and without it the whole exercise fails at the first dialog box.

By default, Tab on a Mac moves between text fields and skips buttons, checkboxes, pop-up menus and lists. That is why a new Mac user presses Tab three times, lands nowhere useful, and concludes the platform is not keyboard-navigable. It is — the behaviour is just off.

Open System Settings → Accessibility → Keyboard and turn on Full Keyboard Access. On older macOS the same switch is under System Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts, at the bottom. Once it is on, Tab and Shift-Tab walk through every control in the focused window, Space activates the focused button or toggles a checkbox, and the arrow keys move within lists, tab bars and segmented controls.

Two things to know about it. First, Control-F1 toggles Full Keyboard Access on and off without opening settings, which is useful while you are learning: leave it off for your normal work and turn it on when you are in a dialog that needs it. Second, with it on, Tab inside a text editor may insert a tab character instead of moving focus — that is the field behaving correctly, not a bug. Control-Tab moves focus out.

While you are in that panel, turn on Keyboard navigation if your macOS version lists it separately. It is the same idea applied to the sidebar and the toolbar, and on some versions it is the switch that actually makes Tab work in System Settings itself.

Step 2: the four regions of the screen

Everything on screen belongs to one of four regions, and each has a shortcut that moves focus to it. These are the ones to learn first, because they are what replaces reaching for the trackpad.

On laptops with a Touch Bar or a function-key row set to media controls, these need the Fn key as well — Fn-Control-F2. If the shortcut does nothing, that is almost always the reason, and the fix is System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control, where the same actions are listed and can be reassigned.

Once the menu bar has focus, the keyboard is a complete interface to the app: left and right move between menus, down opens one, typing a few letters jumps to the item whose name starts with them, and Return activates. Every command an app offers is in there somewhere, including the ones with no shortcut, which is why this is the escape hatch when you do not know the shortcut for something.

Step 3: launching and switching

Command-Space opens Spotlight, you type three or four letters, and Return opens the top hit. That is the baseline and it is fine.

A launcher is better at the edges of that, and the edges are where keyboard users live. Raycast and Alfred both extend the same gesture — a hotkey, a query, a result — into clipboard history, window switching, file search, snippets, calculator, unit conversion, and running a script against the current selection. The practical difference for a keyboard-only workflow is that you stop context-switching: the thing you want is one query away regardless of which app you are in.

Switching between running apps is Command-Tab, and Command- (backtick) cycles windows inside the current app. Both are fine up to about six windows. Past that, cycling is a slot machine: you press the shortcut, look at what appeared, and press it again.

That is the gap window switchers fill. AltTab, Contexts and the switcher built into Raycast all show every window — not every app — as a grid, with a letter or number on each. You press the hotkey, then the key for the window you actually wanted. It is one keystroke instead of an average of four, and more importantly it is deterministic: you are choosing, not hunting.

Step 4: arranging windows

macOS ships with tiling on current versions: Control-Fn-Left and Control-Fn-Right send a window to the left or right half, Control-Fn-Up fills the screen, and dragging to an edge does the same thing with a pointer. If you only ever need two windows side by side, that is enough and you can stop here.

For anything more, the two families of tool behave differently and the difference matters more for keyboard use than for mouse use.

Snap-and-move tools assign a position to a shortcut: this window goes to the left third, that one to the bottom right quarter. Divvy is the classic version, BetterTouchTool bundles it with a great deal else. They are easy to learn because each shortcut does one obvious thing.

Tiling window managers arrange everything for you. AeroSpace and Amethyst keep the screen divided into a tree of panes; opening a window splits the focused pane, closing one gives the space back, and moving between panes is a single shortcut. The layout is always full and always aligned without you deciding anything.

For keyboard-only use the tiling model wins, because the decision you make is which window, not where. You never position anything by eye, which is the one thing a keyboard is genuinely bad at. The cost is a day of confusion while the tree model settles in your head.

Hammerspoon is the third option and the one to know about even if you do not use it: it exposes the window API to Lua, so any arrangement you can describe you can bind to a key. If your ideal layout is “editor on the left two thirds, terminal bottom right, reference top right, and this exact arrangement on every launch”, that is four lines of Lua and no other tool will match it.

Step 5: text, where the keyboard actually wins

This is the part that repays the effort. On a Mac, every text field — every one, in every app, including web forms — understands a set of Emacs-style bindings that predate macOS itself.

Add the selection modifiers and you have everything a mouse does in a text field, without the trip to the trackpad. Shift extends any movement into a selection, so Shift-Option-Right selects a word and Shift-Command-Down selects to the end of the document. Command-Shift-Left selects the whole line.

The single most useful one is Control-K: kill to end of line, then Control-Y to put it back. Once that is in your fingers you stop using the mouse to fix a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, which is where most of the hand travel in writing actually goes.

Step 6: dialogs, forms and the Finder

Dialogs are where Full Keyboard Access pays off. With it on: Tab moves between controls, Space presses the focused button or toggles a checkbox, arrow keys change a pop-up menu, and Return triggers the default button — the one highlighted in blue — while Escape triggers Cancel. Command-. also cancels, and works in apps that do not honour Escape.

The Finder is more keyboard-friendly than its reputation suggests, and most of it is undocumented in the menus people actually open:

Command-Shift-G is the one to internalise. Any path you can type, you can reach in one shortcut from any Finder window, without navigating a folder tree. Combined with Command-Shift-. to reveal what is hidden, it makes the Finder usable for the jobs that would otherwise send you to Terminal.

Step 7: the browser

Safari and Chrome share the important shortcuts, and a browser is where a keyboard-only user spends most of the day.

Command-L focuses the address bar with the current URL selected, so you can type a new one immediately. Command-T opens a tab, Command-W closes it, Control-Tab and Control-Shift-Tab move between tabs, Command-1 through Command-9 jump to a specific tab. Command-F finds on the page, Escape dismisses the find bar, and Command-Option-F puts the cursor in the search field.

For clicking links, browser extensions exist that assign letters to every link on the page; they work, and they are a personal preference rather than a requirement. In practice most keyboard users navigate by searching and by Tab-ing through form fields rather than by trying to click arbitrary links, and the pages where that fails are the pages that are badly built.

Step 8: Mission Control and Spaces

Moving between windows is one problem; moving between whole desktops is another, and macOS handles it entirely from the keyboard.

The reason this matters more for keyboard use than for mouse use is that Spaces become free. With a pointer, moving a window between desktops means dragging it to the edge and waiting; with the keyboard it is a shortcut and the window manager’s job. A layout of one space for writing, one for the browser and reference, and one for whatever the day’s work is, is only practical when switching costs a keystroke.

Note that spaces are created from Mission Control with the pointer — there is no default shortcut for adding one — so set up the number you want once and then never touch the UI again.

Step 9: screenshots and screen recording

The screenshot shortcuts are the ones people know least well relative to how often they use them, and all of them are keyboard-only.

Add Control to any of them to copy the capture to the clipboard instead of saving a file — Control-Command-Shift-3 is the whole screen straight into whatever you are about to paste into. That combination is the one to memorise, because it skips the trip through the Desktop entirely.

Command-Shift-5 is also where screen recording lives, and its Options panel is where you change the save location, the timer and whether the pointer is captured. Those settings persist, so it is worth opening once.

The one place this stays a pointer task is Command-Shift-4 with a dragged selection, which is drawing a rectangle. For window captures, Command-Shift-4 then Space avoids the drag entirely.

Step 10: invent the shortcut that is missing

Every menu item in every app can be given a keyboard shortcut, whether or not the developer provided one. System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → All Applications → +, then type the menu item’s title exactly as it appears in the menu, and assign a key combination.

Two rules make this work. The title must match exactly, including punctuation and ellipsis — a menu item named Export as PDF… with a real ellipsis character will not match one typed with three periods. And the shortcut only fires when the app is frontmost and the menu item is available; a greyed-out item cannot be triggered.

The same panel is where you reassign the system’s own shortcuts, which is how you resolve a conflict with an app that has claimed Control-F2 or Command-Shift-3 for itself. Look for the action, not the app: Mission Control’s shortcuts, Spotlight’s, and the screenshot shortcuts all live here under their own headings.

When the keyboard is not enough

Two accessibility features cover the cases where a keyboard alone genuinely cannot do the job, and both are worth knowing about even if you never need them.

Voice Control (Accessibility → Voice Control) lets you say “click Save” or “show numbers” and then a number, and macOS overlays a numbered grid on whatever is on screen. It is slower than a mouse and it is the difference between being able to use the machine and not.

Mouse Keys (Accessibility → Pointer Control → Alternate Control Methods) turns the numeric keypad into a pointer: 8, 2, 4 and 6 move it, 5 clicks. On a laptop without a keypad it is close to unusable, but with a full keyboard it is a complete mouse replacement, and Option five times toggles it if you enable the shortcut.

Switch Control is the third and the most configurable: it scans through on-screen targets on a timer and you select with a single key, a switch, or a head movement. It is designed for people who cannot use either a keyboard or a mouse, and it is the reason the platform can be driven by one button.

A realistic practice plan

Do not try to switch cold. Pick one thing per day and use it until it is automatic:

1. Day one: Command-Space for every app launch, and Command-Tab for every switch. Nothing else.
2. Day two: Control-K, Control-A, Control-E and the Option-arrow word jumps, in every text field you touch.
3. Day three: Full Keyboard Access on, and complete every dialog with Tab and Space instead of the trackpad.
4. Day four: the Finder table above, starting with Command-Shift-G.
5. Day five: install a window manager and bind four positions. Force yourself to use them for a full day.
6. Day six: a window switcher, if you regularly have more than six windows open.

By the end of that week the shortcuts you use hourly will be automatic, and the ones you do not will have been quietly forgotten — which is the correct outcome. The goal is not to eliminate the mouse; it is to stop your hand leaving the keyboard for things the keyboard does better.

What still needs a pointer

Being honest about the residue is what makes the rest of this credible. Dragging a file into a specific folder in a specific window is still faster with a mouse. Positioning a window to a pixel is still faster with a mouse. Anything involving a canvas — image editing, vector work, video timelines, map panning — is a pointer task by design, and no amount of shortcut discipline changes that.

What changes is the ratio. In a typical writing or development day, the pointer work is a small fraction of the total, and the hand travel to reach it is the expensive part. Keyboard-only habits do not remove the mouse; they remove the twenty trips a day that were never worth making.

FAQ

Does this work the same on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs? Yes. Every shortcut here is macOS, not hardware. The only hardware difference is the function-key row: on laptops where the top row defaults to media keys, the Control-F shortcuts need Fn as well, and that is a setting (System Settings → Keyboard) rather than a platform difference.

Why does Tab not work in some apps even with Full Keyboard Access on? Because the app implements its own focus handling. Electron apps and some web-based apps route Tab to their content, which is correct behaviour for a form and wrong for a toolbar. Control-Tab usually escapes, and Control-F2 plus the menu bar always works regardless of what the app does with Tab.

Is there a shortcut to open the context menu? Control-Return or Control-click with the keyboard — the first is the standard, the second is what the system documents. In the Finder, Control-Return on a selected file opens the same menu a right-click would.

Do I need to buy anything? No. The launcher, window manager and switcher recommendations are conveniences. Spotlight launches apps, the built-in tiling handles two windows, and Command-Tab switches apps. Buy or install something when you hit the specific limitation it fixes, not before.

How long until it stops feeling slow? About a week of deliberate use for the core shortcuts, and longer for window management, which has the steepest curve because it changes how you think about the screen rather than just how you press keys.

What if a shortcut is already taken by an app? Take it back rather than working around it. System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts lists the system’s own bindings and lets you reassign them; an app that has claimed Control-F2 or Command-Shift-3 is usually configurable in its own preferences under a heading like Shortcuts or Keyboard. When two apps both insist on the same combination, the one that is frontmost wins, which makes the conflict look intermittent.

Does a keyboard-only setup help with RSI? It removes the hand travel between keyboard and pointing device, which is the movement most often implicated in wrist and shoulder pain. It does not remove the keyboard, so it is not a complete answer, and anyone with existing pain should treat it as one change among several rather than a fix.