Guide

Create a Custom Keyboard Shortcut on Mac

Updated July 19, 2026

Yes - macOS has this built in, and you don’t need any extra software for it. Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts, click +, type the menu command exactly as it appears in the app, and press the keys you want. The catch is in that word “menu”: this method can only bind commands that already exist as menu items, which rules out a large share of what people actually want shortcuts for.

The steps in full

1. Find the exact menu command. Open the app, open the menu, and read the item carefully. You will have to reproduce its wording exactly.
2. Open App Shortcuts. Apple menu → System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts.
3. Click the Add button (+). In the Application pop-up, pick the app - or All Applications if you want the binding wherever that command exists.
4. Type the Menu title. Exactly as the app shows it.
5. Click the Keyboard shortcut field, press your combination, click Done.

Open the menu again and your shortcut will be sitting next to the command.

The exact-match rule, which is where most attempts fail

Apple’s instruction is to type the command “exactly as the command appears in the app, including the > character (type ->), ellipses (type three periods without spaces), or other punctuation.”

In practice that means:

Three rules that catch people out:

• The ellipsis is three periods, not the … character. Typing the single-glyph ellipsis will not match.
• Submenus use ->, with no spaces around it.
• It’s case- and space-sensitive. A trailing space is invisible and fatal.

If the shortcut simply doesn’t appear next to the menu item, the title didn’t match. That is nearly always the cause.

What this can and can’t do

This is worth being clear about before you spend an evening on it.

It can:

• Give a menu command a shortcut it doesn’t have
• Replace an app’s existing shortcut for a command
• Resolve a conflict, by moving one of the two commands somewhere else
• Apply across every app at once with All Applications

It can’t:

• Launch or switch to an app
• Trigger anything that isn’t a menu item - window tiling, mic mute, Do Not Disturb, a URL, a script
• Vary by context: an All Applications binding is the same everywhere, and a per-app binding only knows about the app, not the website or window you’re in
• Show you what you’ve bound - there’s no overview beyond the list in System Settings

That last group is the honest boundary of the built-in tool. If everything you want is a menu command, App Shortcuts is genuinely all you need and you should stop here.

When you need more than menu commands

The moment your list includes “open my standup doc,” “mute the call,” “tile this window left,” or “jump to the repo I’m working in,” App Shortcuts can’t help - none of those are menu items. That’s the gap a hyper key layer fills: one key that no app claims, holding a set of commands that aren’t restricted to menus and that can change meaning based on the app or website you’re in.

It’s also worth reading why remapping to keys that mean something to you beats memorising defaults, and how to lay those bindings out so they don’t collide.

Before you rebind: check what’s already there

Plenty of the shortcuts people set out to create already exist and just aren’t well known. Worth a look at the default shortcuts for the apps you use - and especially the system-wide macOS and Finder ones, since those work everywhere and are the ones most often reinvented.

If you’re trying to fix a shortcut that used to work, keyboard shortcuts not working on Mac covers the usual causes.