batguebi01: Assign a keyboard shortcut to Private Browsing in Safari

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

Assign a keyboard shortcut to Private Browsing in Safari

The Private Browsing mode in Safari has no default keyboard shortcut, and the toggle has a modal confirmation dialog. This hint shows how to assign a keyboard shortcut to Private Browsing and bypass the confirmation dialog.

One of my favourite features of Mac OS X is the ability to assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item of any application. This is fairly straightforward and was covered in many hints before.

In order to assign a keyboard shortcut, in this case to the Private Browsing toggle in Safari, we have to do the following:

Open System Preferences and navigate to 'Keyboard' section.
Select the 'Keyboard Shortcuts' tab.
Select 'Application Shortcuts' from the list.
Click on the Plus sign, select the application, type in the name of the menu item, and enter the shortcut.

The instruction says that we should 'Enter the exact name of the menu command you want to add.' When doing so, i.e. type 'Private Bro ...