Guide

Mac Keyboard Symbols: What ⌘ ⌥ ⌃ ⇧ Mean

Updated July 19, 2026

Mac keyboard symbols are shorthand for the modifier keys: ⌘ is Command, ⌥ is Option (labelled Alt on some keyboards), ⌃ is Control, and ⇧ is Shift. macOS menus print these symbols instead of words so an entire shortcut fits in a few characters - ⌘⇧4 means hold Command and Shift, then press 4.

The four modifier symbols

These four account for almost every shortcut you’ll meet.

The ⌘ symbol is sometimes called the “looped square”, “Bowen knot”, or “place of interest sign”. It was borrowed from Scandinavian road signage marking a landmark, after Steve Jobs objected to filling the Mac’s menus with Apple logos.

The other symbols you’ll see in menus

Non-modifier keys get symbols too, and these are the ones that most often leave people guessing.

How to read a shortcut

Symbols are printed left to right, but that’s not the order you press them. Hold every modifier down together, then tap the final key once. In ⌘⇧G, the ⌘ and ⇧ are held while you press G - not a sequence of three presses.

Apple’s own convention orders the modifiers ⌃ ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ when several appear, so the last symbol before the letter is almost always Command. That ordering is cosmetic; the keys are simultaneous either way.

A few conventions worth knowing:

• A hyphen in Apple’s documentation means the same thing as the symbols. Apple’s support pages write “Shift-Command-N” where the menu shows ⌘⇧N.
• ⌥ often means “the variant of this command.” Holding Option while a menu is open swaps several items for alternates - Close becomes Close All, Save As appears, and so on.
• All four modifiers at once (⌃⌥⌘⇧) is the hyper key - a combination almost no app claims, which is exactly why it’s the safe place to put your own shortcuts.

Why Macs use symbols and Windows uses words

Windows shortcuts are written out (“Ctrl+Shift+N”) because Windows only ever had two or three modifiers in common use. The Mac has four, and combinations of three or four are routine - so spelling them out would make menus unreadable. Symbols keep a four-key shortcut to four characters, and they work regardless of what language the menu is in or what’s printed on the physical keycap.

That last point matters more than it sounds: the same ⌘ appears in the menu whether your keyboard prints the ⌘ loop, the word “command”, or nothing at all.

Where to find the symbols on your keyboard

On a modern Apple keyboard, Command sits either side of the space bar, Option is outside it, and Control is on the far bottom-left. Caps Lock - the ⇪ key - sits on the home row and does almost nothing, which is why it’s the most common key to remap.

If you want to type the symbols themselves, press ⌃⌘Space to open the Character Viewer and search for “command” or “option”. They’re regular Unicode characters (⌘ is U+2318), so they paste anywhere.

Looking up what a shortcut actually does

Knowing the symbols only gets you as far as reading a shortcut - you still have to know what each app binds them to. We keep cheat sheets of the default shortcuts for popular Mac apps, curated from each vendor’s official documentation, including the system-wide macOS and Finder shortcuts that work everywhere.