Make a printable cheat sheet of any Mac app's shortcuts

To make a printable cheat sheet for a Mac app, gather its shortcuts from the app’s menus, keep only the ones you want to learn, and print a single page. You can do it by hand, by taking a screenshot of each menu or typing the shortcuts into a two-column table. Or use Typebar, which builds a cheatsheet from the app’s menus that you can edit and export as a PNG or PDF.

Either way, the page you print should be short. A sheet that lists everything goes in a drawer; one that lists your next dozen shortcuts gets read.

Why a paper sheet still helps

A cheat sheet on screen competes with the work you are doing. It covers part of the window, or it sits in another window you have to switch to. Paper sits beside the keyboard and costs a glance.

Paper also takes a pen. You can circle the shortcuts you are learning this week and cross off the ones you have. You can tape it below a shared edit suite’s monitor, or hand out copies to a class before a lesson.

The catch is that a printed sheet is only as good as what you put on it. Published lists of every shortcut in a big app run to several pages, most of it things you will never press. The useful sheet is one page, for one app, with your shortcuts on it.

Decide what goes on the page

Before you collect anything, decide what the sheet is for.

• The shortcuts you are learning now. Ten to twenty is plenty for a page you can read at a glance. Add more later, on a new sheet.
• Grouped by job. Headings like Editing, Navigation and Export read faster than the app’s own File, Edit and View, because you look things up by what you want to do.
• The keys menus leave out. Single-key tools and keys you hold, like Space to drag the canvas in Photoshop or Figma, are the hardest to discover on screen, so they are the most worth printing.
• Your own changes. If you have remapped keys in your editor, print yours. A sheet of defaults you no longer use teaches the wrong thing.

Build one by hand from the menus

The menus already have the shortcuts printed beside each command, so a set of menu screenshots is a quick first draft.

1. Open a menu in the app.
2. Press Command-Shift-4 (⇧⌘4), then press the Space bar. The pointer turns into a camera.
3. Click the open menu. macOS saves a picture of just that menu, to the desktop unless you have changed where screenshots go. Hold Option as you click to leave out the shadow.
4. Repeat for each menu you care about.
5. In Finder, select the screenshots, Control-click one of them, and choose Quick Actions > Create PDF to combine them into one file.

That gives you everything in the menus, which is usually more than a page. For a sheet you will actually read, use the screenshots as a source and type the ones you want into a two-column table in Pages or Numbers: the job on the left, the keys on the right. Writing keys as words (Command-Shift-E) is clearer on paper than a row of symbols for anyone still learning them; Mac keyboard symbols explained has the symbols if you prefer them. Use a large font, since the page will be at arm’s length.

Some apps offer a reference of their own. In VS Code, Help > Keyboard Shortcuts Reference opens a PDF of the default Mac shortcuts in your web browser, which you can print from there. It shows the defaults only, so any key you changed will be wrong on it.

Export a cheat sheet from Typebar

Typebar builds a cheatsheet for whatever app is in front. Hold a modifier (⌘, ⌥, ⌃ or ⇧) for a moment and its on-screen keyboard relabels with what each key does in that app. It reads each app’s own menus, so every app has a sheet, and 20 hand-made packs add the shortcuts menus leave out in apps such as Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Figma, Blender and Excel.

You can rename, hide or add shortcuts for any app:

• Hide the commands you never use, and the ones you already know.
• Rename shortcuts whose menu names are long or vague, so they read in your words.
• Add keys that no menu lists.

To take a sheet out of Typebar, export it as a PNG or a PDF. Open the file and check it before you print, the same as you would a sheet you made by hand.

This helps most in editors you have customized. Typebar reads your own keybindings in 11 apps, among them VS Code, Cursor, Xcode, JetBrains IDEs, Sublime Text, Zed and iTerm2, from their settings files, so its cheatsheet shows the keys you actually press rather than the defaults. Learn your editor’s keybindings, including the ones you changed has more on that.

If you would rather practice from the screen than from paper, Typebar can also pin a sheet with a double tap.

Print it so it is easy to read

Open the PNG or PDF in Preview and choose File > Print, or press Command-P.

• If the sheet is wider than it is tall, switch the orientation to landscape.
• Look at the preview in the print dialog before you print. The smallest text on the page should be easy to read from where you sit.
• To keep a print-ready copy, open the PDF menu at the bottom of the print dialog and choose Save as PDF.

Then put the page where your eyes go when you hesitate: below the screen, beside the trackpad, or pinned to the wall behind the display.

Keep it short, and keep it current

A good cheat sheet shrinks. Once a shortcut comes to your fingers without looking, cross it off. When most of the page is crossed off, make the next sheet with the next set. In Typebar, hide the shortcuts you have learned as you go.

The sheet is a prop for a habit, not a replacement for it. How to learn Mac keyboard shortcuts and actually remember them covers the habit: a few shortcuts a week, practiced on real work.

Typebar is $9 once, and free for 24 hours with everything on.

Questions

Can macOS print a list of an app’s shortcuts?

Not directly. You can screenshot the menus and combine the pictures into a PDF, or type the shortcuts you want into a table and print that. A few apps, VS Code among them, offer a printable reference of their default shortcuts.

How do I take a screenshot of an open menu on a Mac?

Open the menu, press Command-Shift-4, press the Space bar, then click the menu. Hold Option as you click to leave out the shadow.

How long should a printed cheat sheet be?

One page, for one app, with only the shortcuts you are learning. If it needs a second page, it has too much on it.