Use Tab To Switch Between Dialog Buttons 28

Tip

Use Tab To Switch Between Dialog Buttons

Hey

The one single “bug” on Mac OS X by far is the ability to switch buttons in dialog boxes. For example I mean using Tab to go between OK, Cancel, Don’t Save etc. For a long while until today I had just got used to using the mouse. Although you can use some shortcut keys for Save, but these aren’t always reliable. Windows has the ability to tab through button options. Why not Mac? Well you can and it is blindingly obvious.

To enable you to tab through dialog boxes go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Shrotcuts. At the very bottom there will be an option saying about full keyboard access. Check the radio button that says “All Controls”.

Now when you find a dialog box (a new file in TextEdit is quickest), when you hit tab you will be able to move through the dialog box options. Very neat. As the option at the bottom states if you hit Control + F7 you will be able to change this setting, although I doubt would have to.

Only a simple tip today. But one that has bugged my for over two years. The simple tips are sometimes the best.


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28 Responses to “Use Tab To Switch Between Dialog Buttons”

  1. 1

    As a note, you activate the selected item by pressing the space bar, not enter/return as some might think.

    Comment By Seth Matheson on October 15th, at 4:58 am

  2. 2

    In addition to that:
    On my System (10.5.4) you cannot press to confirm your tab selected dialog button. will just choose the preselected, blue highlighted button. If you want to choose the button selected with tab (blue border) you need to press to confirm.
    At least at my system.
    I found that pretty annoying when changing from 10.3 to 10.5
    Took me a while to find out that works ;)

    Comment By CrystalEYE on October 15th, at 7:38 am

  3. 3

    Thank you!!! This has been bugging the hell out of me and I’m glad to have finally found a fix.

    Comment By Blake on October 15th, at 4:12 pm

  4. 4

    Thank you for this, I thought I was just being an idiot, especially with pressing space instead of return.

    I cant remember how many times I have tried to search for this only to give in!

    Cheers

    Comment By lee on October 15th, at 6:23 pm

  5. 5

    respect for this, I am a new mac user, and I was wondering why windows has it and leopard not…

    Comment By djordje on October 17th, at 1:17 pm

  6. 6

    this is really cool man ,
    thanks

    Comment By Ettore on October 17th, at 1:18 pm

  7. 7

    Thank you!! This has been driving me CRAZY!!! My favorite line: “Well you can and it is blindingly obvious.” I about fell out of my chair :P Thanks again!

    Comment By Tiffani on October 23rd, at 7:14 pm

  8. 8

    Thank you so much, this had been bugging me for years… :D

    Comment By Luisa on November 14th, at 12:54 pm

  9. 9

    This has been bugging me since I got my first mac about 4 years ago with Panther. I finally got fed up with it and did a google search for “how to tab change option button”. Everything else I tried gave me stupid tab window info from safari or firefox.

    Thank you so much. I can’t wait to get started using this feature that I never knew I had.

    Comment By Dave on December 10th, at 12:25 pm

  10. 10

    omg. thank you so much for this tip. i have only had a mac for about 3 weeks now, but this was driving me up the proverbial wall. happy holidays!

    Comment By matt on December 16th, at 5:39 am

  11. 11

    WOW! Thank you.

    Comment By Tony on January 15th, at 7:59 pm

  12. 12

    THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Comment By GSavage on March 19th, at 6:08 am

  13. 13

    you made my day.

    Comment By Alborz Geramifard on August 3rd, at 5:46 pm

  14. 14

    thank you so much! such a frustration! you can hit tab then spacebar to select!

    Comment By econo on August 5th, at 4:15 am

  15. 15

    One million thank yous to you! This has been driving me crazy and was a major decision in switching to mac from pc. I’m very short-cut & keyboard oriented.

    I didn’t understand the ‘confirm’ comment but I’ve noticed that tabbing to a button (now that THAT is working) and hitting enter did not actually ‘press’ the button. Anyone? What’s the confirm key (enter? cause that doesn’t do it…)

    Comment By mahalie on January 30th, at 8:31 am

  16. 16

    I just answered my own question…use the space bar (instead of enter as you would on a pc). So, tab to button you want, then hit space to select. Thanks again!

    Comment By mahalie on January 30th, at 8:59 am

  17. 17

    Just moved over to mac environment recently. This was driving me insane and I couldn’t figure out why such a simple thing in windows was not present in mac. I know this post is old but thank for the tip.

    Another thing that kind of annoys me is that in windows, if I wanted to rename multiple files, I could click to rename the first one. Then, while the first file’s filename is still highlighted, I could hit tab, which would highlight the next filename in line. I don’t have to rename files too often, but when I do, I almost think about booting into windows. I know I could use software to do this but renaming just a few files quickly is not worth using the software

    Comment By Jordan on February 17th, at 6:09 pm

  18. 18

    yeah, cheers, its a real simple one, has bugged me a long time too!

    Comment By Vinod pillai on March 30th, at 11:11 am

  19. 19

    Great tip! I’m a recent switcher and this is exactly what I was looking for! First google result and success, thank you!

    Comment By stinkynuts on May 26th, at 1:31 pm

  20. 20

    Thank you. Finally after dealing with this for years I decided to google this annoyance and you solved it for me.

    Comment By Jason King on June 25th, at 10:12 pm

  21. 21

    That’s a life saver post! Thank you!

    Comment By xdxter on August 6th, at 1:37 am

  22. 22

    Finally! Thanks for the tip.

    I gotta say though, its pretty lame on Apple’s part to not have that on by default. It’s such a HUGE usability feature. _Even_ MS got it right!!

    Comment By CiPheR on April 10th, at 7:50 pm

  23. 23

    But then it strangely does not work on photoshop – strange and stupid. (I’m using cs3).

    Comment By ttv on June 8th, at 12:02 pm

  24. 24

    A very nice tip.

    Unfortunately, it does not work for all dialog windows. For example, I cannot get out of the text field in the Word for Mac spelling checker (the dialog you get to when the cursor is in a red-underlined word and you press ALT+CMD+L). Is there a way to get out of that without a mouse?

    Comment By Anneke on June 27th, at 4:10 pm

  25. 25

    Thank you! thank you! thank you! I can’t thank you enough!
    This issue has bugged me for more than a year!
    And one more time, thank you! to Seth Matheson, I was hitting “Enter” and coursing all day! its incredible stupid that you have to hit the space bar and not Enter to activate the selected button! how in the world could you figure that? you are truly a genius!
    I did more than 500 Google searches about this topic and, until now, it was an impossible mission.
    For ttv: yes, it does work on Photoshop, but you have to use the space bar not Enter, as Seth Matheson discovered.
    I was considering very seriously to go back to Windows, its really a waste of time being forced to use the mouse every time a dialog box appears!
    Again thank you, both, James and Seth and best regards to you,

    PS I don’t know how, but this Trick should be available to every Mac user in the world, it is really that good!

    Comment By Max Alvelais on September 2nd, at 7:05 am

  26. 26

    Sometimes babies like to bite those toys. I wonder, is it really safe to use for them?

    Comment By Grady Poor on December 3rd, at 2:04 pm

  27. 27

    Hey, another happy Mac user who found this – thanks for taking the time to post!

    Comment By Andrew on December 8th, at 1:00 pm

  28. 28

    I’m sorry, but while this tip is helpful, it is not enough. I frequently will use tab to switch from the “search bar” on the top right of iTunes, to the playlists on the left, to the song field. But with this “All controls” option enabled, it now tabs through every single button on the top bar in iTunes, which is a major hassle for a keyboard user.

    iTunes is only an example. This same problem becomes present in many applications, including Mail. When you are in the subject field, you must now hit tab 3 times to get to the message field. So while this feature benefits us in one way, it makes things a hassle in another way.

    Anyway, I thank you for putting this tip up. I hope apple will separate this feature into two parts, so that we can tab through pop up dialogues without having to tab through EVERYTHING on all of our applications. Or hopefully someone will come up with a third party solution. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the Mac OS. If anybody has a solution, I would be most grateful!

    Comment By Mareo Raft on December 18th, at 6:30 am

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