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August 14, 2007

tips

Fastest way to open System Preferences yet

Posted Aug. 14, ’07, 8:11 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

Sound preferencesAnd it’s time for yet another installment of “Silly OS X Tricks I Accidentally Discovered.”

I was watching a video on my MacBook while flying back from Chicago yesterday, and I thought to myself that the sound was kind of hard to hear over the airplane engines. Remembering that there’s a trick for increasing the QuickTime plugin’s sound levels (hold shift), I thought maybe the same thing would work in QuickTime Player.

No such luck. However, I pressed on, trying various key combinations to see if any of them yielded my desired result. So I was somewhat surprised when I hit option and the volume up key on my keyboard, and the Sound panel of System Preferences opened. “Huh,” I thought, “that’s odd.” I tried it again: sure enough, holding option and hitting any of the volume control keys on the MacBook’s keyboard caused the Sound preferences to open. On a hunch, I tried the brightness control keys and discovered that, as you might have guessed, the Display preferences opened. Furthermore, if System Preferences is open, hitting one of those key combinations will open that preference pane in the app.

Useful? I dunno: it is a pretty quick way to open those preference panes, but honestly, I’m not sure it would be the first thing I would think of. But maybe you, dear readers, will find it handy.


9 Comments

nicleT said:

Pretty useful actually! Thanks for the tip.

August 14, 2007 8:37 AM
Justin said:

Also, hitting option and the keyboard backlight keys on the MBP bring up the keyboard shortcuts pref pane.

August 14, 2007 9:38 AM
James "Nachtigall" Carey said:

Holding command+shift and hitting the up arrow does increase Quicktime's volume beyond the perceived limit, checked that when I was waching movies at work in a large noisy warehouse.

August 14, 2007 11:35 AM
Dan Moren Author Profile Page said:

@James: Great catch! I suspected this was in there somewhere, since VLC lets me increase the volume above its threshold too. Thanks!

August 14, 2007 11:43 AM
Ludger Heide said:

I discovered it accidentally too while trying to quit an application in Fusion running Windows. Thougt it was already covered

August 14, 2007 11:47 AM
stacey said:

Works in 10.3.9 as well, FWIW.

August 14, 2007 3:52 PM
Larry V Author Profile Page said:

Yeah, my Windows-using girlfriend found this by accident trying to close an application ("alt"+F4).

August 14, 2007 6:51 PM
Kalessin Author Profile Page said:

But, how do you make videos louder? Or did you abandon that?

August 16, 2007 6:36 AM
Neil Anderson said:

Awesome. Works on my extended keyboard, too.

August 16, 2007 4:58 PM

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