Restoring Mail Keyboard Shortcuts
I’ve long used the Keyboard pane in System Preferences to assign shortcuts for the items in “From” pop-up menu in Mail’s “New Message” window. This lets me send the message from a different account just by pressing a key.
(Interestingly, this same technique works for the standard “Save as PDF…” menu item when printing, but not for user-supplied PDF services.)
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion introduced a bug whereby editing a keyboard shortcut for any application would render the Mail keyboard shortcuts inoperable. If you examine Mail’s preferences file, you can see that a non-printable character is inserted on either side of the menu item title. Preferences for other applications are unaffected; I think some part of the OS doesn’t like that the titles of these menu items contain angle brackets.
Before editing a shortcut in System Preferences, you can use this Terminal command to save your Mail keyboard shortcuts:
defaults read com.apple.mail NSUserKeyEquivalents
Copy everything in curly braces, which for me is:
{
"Add Sender to Address Book" = "@~^$y";
"Michael Tsai <dropdmg@c-command.com>" = "@^$d";
"Michael Tsai <eaglefiler@c-command.com>" = "@^$e";
"Michael Tsai <mjt@c-command.com>" = "@^$c";
"Michael Tsai <mjt@mjtsai.com>" = "@^$m";
"Michael Tsai <mtsai@atpm.com>" = "@^$a";
"Michael Tsai <spamsieve@c-command.com>" = "@^$s";
}
To restore the Mail keyboard shortcuts, type:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSUserKeyEquivalents '
Then paste, enter the closing ', and press Return.
Update (2012-07-31): This bug seems to be fixed in Mountain Lion.
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I use keyboard shortcuts tied to AppleScripts launched with FastScripts. The use GUI scripting.
Chucky: You might find these similar keyboard shortcut ideas handy, too: http://www.macworld.com/article/1165129/five_keyboard_shortcuts_you_should_set_up_now.html
Interesting, but what do you do if you have already clobbered your Mail shortcuts? When I look at com.apple.mail, using the defaults read command, there is stuff in there I don’t think I ever set up, and some of it just does not work.
@Allen You can use “defaults read” and clean up the results in a text editor before pasting back into Terminal. For example, on my Mac this would mean removing the control characters (e.g. “\033”) and restoring the “>” that was deleted to be sure that the menu titles match.
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"Interestingly, this same technique works for the standard “Save as PDF…” menu item"
Thank you. I did not know that, and it will prove useful to me. (I seem to be only four years behind the curve on this one...)