MacOS – How to rebind Go Back and Go Forward in Preview on Lion

keyboardmacospreview

It seems that in Lion, standard shortcuts were added for the Go menu items Back and Forward. The shortcuts (+[ and +]) are unusable on Finnish keyboard, and I'd like to rebind them. By unusable I mean that e.g. [ is produced with Alt+8 on a Finnish keyboard, and pressing +Alt+8 does not do anything in Preview.

I have added Forward and Back shortcuts for Preview.app under System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Application Shortcuts, but Preview only shows the default shortcuts. In Snow Leopard I was able to (re?)bind the actions this way, but it seems that this doesn't work in Lion.

What to do? Navigating huge PDF files without back/forward is painful.

Best Answer

If the System Preferences way of doing that doesn't work, the only other way I can think of remapping the command would be to use something such as Keyboard Maestro or TextExpander. Barring that, though (as they're both paid, third-party apps), there are still two ways to do navigate pages easily:

  • Trackpad gestures

    This only works with multi-touch trackpads, such as the Apple-sold Bluetooth ones or the built-in-to-MacBook ones. Go to System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures and tick the "Swipe between pages" option. Set it to taste, and use that setting in Preview to switch pages.

  • Page up/down keys

    If you have a full-size keyboard, you have page up/page down keys. If not, something that will probably work is using Fn + /. This will scroll down and up by approximately one screen's worth. (Tip: Fn + left/right arrows act as Home/End keys.) If all else fails, space and shift-space do the same thing.