Get your Exposé Shortcut Keys Back

With the introduction of the new iMac a few months ago, Apple released a newly-designed keyboard. It has been received positively, mostly because its industrial design is both visually stunning and potentially reduces the risk of repetitive stress injuries due to the smaller incline. However, several people, including this humble author, have a beef with the fact that Apple rearranged the special-function keys along the keyboard’s top. For no apparent reason, Apple decided that they should move these keys around and, in some cases, remove them altogether.

The good news is that, in at least one case, the missing functionality can be re-found with a simple, little trick.

On my old Mac’s keyboard, Exposé was controlled by the F9, F10 and F11 keys. F9 gave me all windows, F10 gave me the current application’s windows and F11 hid all windows. These were, of course, customizable assignments, bit this was the default behavior - and I committed it to muscle memory. On the new keyboard, only the old F9 functionality exists and it is mapped to a different key, F3. This creates two problems: first, I was consistently hitting the wrong key to show all windows and, second, I could no longer access the F10 or F11 versions of Exposé.

Enter the magical modifier keys, Command and Control. In Mac OS X these keys do wonders, often adding secret additional functionality to mouse clicks, keyboard shortcuts and menu commands. In this case, they modify the new keyboard’s single existing Exposé key, allowing it to do three times the work of a single button. It works as follows:

• F3: show all windows (used to be F9)
• Ctrl-F3: shows current application’s windows (used to be F10)
• ⌘-F3: hides all windows (used to be F11)

Sure, this requires retraining my muscle memory, but such is the price of progress. On the flip side, the new keyboard gives us dedicated iTunes control keys which we did not have before. And, if you really miss the single-press access to the other Exposé options, you can alway use the Keyboard Shortcuts section of the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane to map those functions to the unassigned function keys at the upper-right side of the new keyboard.