Safari Hover Link Preview Keyboard Shortcut
Pressing control-command-d (⌃⌘D) while hovering over a link in Safari opens a popup window containing a preview of the linked web page, just like pressing and holding down a link in Safari on iOS.
Apple does say that you can preview a link in a webpage in Safari on Mac with a Force Touch trackpad, but Apple’s support document doesn’t mention the keyboard shortcut. Typically, the control-command-d shortcut is used to show or hide the definition of the selected word, and indeed this works in Safari to show the Dictionary definition when hovering over non-link text. So the link preview behavior of the keyboard shortcut was a surprise, at least to me.
This was new to me, too. It doesn’t work on my main Mac, even with a safe boot, so I guess it’s controlled by an unknown setting that I somehow turned off. It does work on a Mac with a clean install of macOS.
Previously:
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Just tried it. Thought "Wow, really nice, can't believe I've never heard about this". Then found out that it crashes Safari when the preview is dismissed. 100% reproducible!
As NaOH this goes back a long time, and to no-ones surprise, that works also in the Finder: rest the cursor over a .webloc file and press the ctrl-cmd-D shortcut, and you can do the same for .txt or any image format supported by the OS and so on. And in Preview, or Mail, or …
That is: QuickLook in action.
I noticed that 3D Touch does not bring up dictionary words like it used to, on my Mac with a Magic Trackpad 2. It brings up the dictionary, but it no longer passes the selected word to the dictionary app. I didn't notice this at first, I don't know when it broke, ,but this is a potential lead on a fix.
I think this shortcut should be mapped to a spacebar because it is just a quick look, and it should work the same everywhere. I also don't like that the preview window is scaled down version of full safari window, so on 6K screen with Safari full-screen it looks tiny but it doesn't need to.
Holy moly this is cool! I also had no idea. It's a great feature that needs talked about more. Shame its been around and we are just discovering it
The hover shortcut for previewing a link goes back to at least OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Back then, I'm almost certain the shortcut was shown in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, though there's no listing for the shortcut in 10.14 Mojave.