Is it possible to migrate keyboard shortcuts for all the applications via an export

keyboardkeynote

I have a bunch of keyboard shortcuts setup for Pages, Keynote, and several other programs. Is there a way to export and then import these shortcuts? I just reformatted my home computer and am now going through the painful process of re-creating all the shortcuts.

Paul Irish's dotfiles got me thinking about this: https://github.com/paulirish/dotfiles

Best Answer

It depends on how you have defined the shortcut keys. The files responsible for storing these preferences are in the usual place: ~/Library/Preferences

You could simply move the files that store the preferences over to the new Mac:

  • com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist
  • com.apple.universalaccess.plist
  • com.apple.iWork.Keynote.plist
  • com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist

If you were good at parsing JSON or XML, you could do the export to a text file as well using the plutil tool.