Keyboard Shortcut – Binding a Key to Shut Down

keyboardshutdown

I want to bind a gesture in BetterTouchTool to the shut down menu that is invoked by pressing the power button on my MacBook Air.

It's fairly simple to bind gestures to keyboard shortcuts, so what I'm really looking for is a way to bind a keyboard shortcut to the shut down menu. You can't use the power button in BetterTouchTool, so I need to bind it to a standard keyboard shortcut such as Command+Shift+S.

Best Answer

You don't need to map the power button, that menu is already mapped to control+eject

Other useful shutdown/restart/logoff key mappings are below which might be of interest too

Prompt to save work and restart the Mac - Control+Command+Eject

Prompt to save work and shutdown the Mac - Control+Option+Command+Eject

Sleep - Command+Option+Eject

Sleep displays - Shift+Control+Eject

If the computer isn't responding and you need to force it to power off, you can hold down the power button for 6 seconds, you'll lose unsaved work though.

These power shortcuts are listed on the apple support pages

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Many applications like Terminal also have a menu item like Window > Cycle Through Windows. It stays assigned to ⌘` even if you change the shortcut in the Keyboard & Text Input preferences.

You could add a custom shortcut for Cycle Through Windows in the Application Shortcuts preferences, or disable it with defaults write -g NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Cycle Through Windows" nul.

You could also force TotalTerminal to use ⌘` by editing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist directly.

<key>ToggleVisor</key>
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    <integer>50</integer>
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MacOS – Keyboard Viewer via keyboard shortcut wont actually quit after closing it

open -a and launch seem to keep it open as well. But if you show the keyboard viewer from the input menu and close the window, the process is quit immediately. So one workaround might be to emulate clicking the menu item:

tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer"
    tell (menu bar item 1 where description is "text input") of menu bar 1
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end tell

Also, I can re-open the application after closing it via a keyboard shortcut ONLY WHEN I open the viewer via the menu button or settings.

If all windows have been closed, activate doesn't usually open a new default window. reopen would do that, but it doesn't seem to work with KeyboardViewer.

Best Answer

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