Enabling keyboard navigation on your Mac

1 minute read

I'm starting a new role soon, and they shipped me a brand new Macbook Pro.

I got everything set up on my Mac over the past few weeks, but today I got a prompt about wanting to confirm the deletion of a file. I used the keyboard like I did on my previous Mac and realized it didn't work. I clearly had forgotten to adjust some settings on my new MacBook. Sure, I can use the mouse, but I had been so used to the keyboard for this.

All right, we need to head on over to our Keyboard settings.

System preferences main panel in macOS

See that checkbox labelled Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls? You're going to want to check that.

Keyboard settings in macOS preferences

And you're done! Now you can use the keyboard for things like confirmation dialogs.

A deletion prompt in VS Code

Photo by hannah joshua on Unsplash