Where are the Keyboard Shortcuts stored?

When I changed a setting in System Preferences Keyboard & Mouse pane Keyboard Shortcuts pane, the only preference file that got updated was at

<your user folder>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to move this file between different Mac models. I don't know what else is stored there, and different models may have incompatible settings.

We just went through searching for this on another thread, for other reasons. In addition to the previous post, the Finder shortcuts are stored in the Finder plist, and there is also a symbolichotkey plist that was involved, although I'm not sure what part it plays. It happened to be corrupted in this other thread and was preventing the shortcuts from being saved.

I had some very customized short-cuts I wanted to move from my old G4 Mac to my new MacPro, which were stored in a custom symbolichotkeys.plist. Copied the file over, but ran into a snag: the new keyboard had one more F key than the old. Working with this file to get what I wanted was a bit of a nightmare. I also couldn't remember just what I had done on the old machine to reverse the shortcuts for GetInfo and Inspector (turns out the entry is in com.finder.plist, and the notation is rather esoteric). Really, the best thing to do is to write down what your custom shortcuts are, how you got them, and save your note. Then re-do it on the new/different machine.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

..." I have several Keyboard shortcuts that i have created using the Keyboard Shortcuts in OS X Tiger for certain apps."...

As the others have implied, where a key combination is stored depends on the nature of the shortcut. For example, the "Exposé" ones go in "com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist", or the "focus" ones go in "com.apple.universalaccess.plist"...

But for the most part, the "custom" ones are stored under the ' NSUserKeyEquivalents' property in individual application plist files, or if they are assigned to "All Applications", in the user's invisible ".GlobalPreferences.plist" file. Since they may be scattered all over the place, transferring them may not be so easy. To get an idea of where the ones of this type are, try opening "/Application" > "Utilities" > "Terminal.app" and enter this command:<pre>
defaults find NSUserKeyEquivalents</pre>