Mail Keyboard Tip #2 - Navigating Links

Reading Emails

Mail allows you to receive both text and HTML emails. Thanks to a fairly vague interface there is no easy way to identify if you have TAB'd (⇥) into the body of the email you want to read, the only sure way is to hit the RETURN/ENTER key (↩) when you have the email you want to read selected in the list view. Doing this however, opens a completely new window - something I personally dislike so I just rely on the list selection turning grey rather than it's normal color (as show below).

Either way, once you are in the body of the email you have recourse to all of the expected keys - Up & Down Arrows move the body of the email up and down by what appears to be one line with each press, and auto-repeat from holding down the key gives a reasonable scrolling experience. Similarly, Page Up ( ⇞ ) and Page Down ( ⇟ ) move a page at a time, which in this context means about 90% of the displayed email body is either paged up or down. Finally, the Home and End keys on your keyboard will jump either to the start or end of email body. All of these should be obvious as they are part of the standard interaction used on the Mac.

What isn't so obvious is that when reading an email you can jump from link to link by using the combination of Opt + TAB ( ⌥ ⇥ ) and to go backwards SHIFT + Opt + TAB ( ⇧⌥ ⇥ ) As you can see in the second view of the Google Alerts email, Mail nicely highlights the selected link and will open it for you with a simple press of the RETURN/ENTER key (↩).

To paraphrase late night infomercials "BUT WAIT! There's more!" - if you hold down the Apple key (  ) Mail will launch the browser of your choice behind Mail for your later reading pleasure. Just to top it all off - you can force Safari to open a new Tab or Window by holding down the Option key ( ⌥ ) when pressing the RETURN/ENTER key (↩) with or without the Apple key (  ).

Finally - the nice thing is that it works in both text emails and HTML formatted email, and as you can see from the HTML formatted Footy newsletter - Mail still highlights the selected link with a nice focus rectangle.

Writing Emails

At this point - if you're still reading this longer than intended post - you should have discerned a trend in the way the "built-in" Mac OS X software work, ie. it adheres to a consistent standard that logically extends itself to the specific environment you are working in. The same process applies to editing an email that you're writing. Rather than run you through all the basic text editing keyboard tricks (like Opt-Left/Right Arrow to move one word or Apple-Left/Right Arrow to move to the beginning or end of a line), I'm just going to point out a few you might have missed.

Jump to Start of Paragraph: Opt + Up Arrow ( ⌥↑ ) will move the editing cursor to the beginning of the current paragraph, or the previous one if your already at the start. I'm betting you can figure out what happens if you use the Opt + Down Arrow combination. Of course following standard Mac interaction using the Shift key ( ⇧ ) these combinations turns the move into a selection.

Jump to Start of Email: Now you're probably saying that's easy just use the Home key - sorry fail. In fact when in editing mode to jump to the start or end of the current email that your typing in you use the combination of Apple key + Up Arrow ( ↑ ) or Apple key + Down Arrow ( ↓ )

That's enough for now - if you have any more not-so-obvious keyboard shortcuts feel free to sound off in the comments.