How to access context menu with keyboard?

Question

How to access context menu with keyboard?

I'm trying to find out how to bring up the context menu from the keyboard. On Windows, this is done with <Shift>-F10, but I can find the equivalent on Mac OS X. Am I missing something here?

Thanks in advance.

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Dec 14, 2005 11:54 PM

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Answer 1

⚠️

Top-ranking reply

Bruce Bailey

Level 2

420 points

Dec 15, 2005 6:33 PM in response to James Davidson

You will need to enable either Mouse Keys or VoiceOver in order to Control-Click without using the mouse. With Mouse Keys enabled, open contextual menus is Control-Num Pad 5. With VoiceOver enabled, it is open Control-Option-Shift-M.

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Answer 2

Nikle

Level 1

14 points

Dec 18, 2005 7:13 PM in response to Bruce Bailey

This will perform a ctrl-click where the mouse is, but how can one ctrl-click on highlighted text? For example you want to perform a spell check, so you press CMD ; you now have a word highlighted and you want to open the context menu to correct it?

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Answer 3

Dec 19, 2005 1:30 PM in response to Bruce Bailey

Thanks. That's just what I needed to know.

The Mouse Keys method worked fine. I couldn't get the VoiceOver approach to work, but I was just looking for one method.

Too bad none of this is enabled by default. I find Apple's strong dependency on the mouse to be a pain, but I guess they're targeting a market of less experienced users.

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Answer 4

Dec 20, 2005 5:09 PM in response to Nikle

You are quite correct that you have to have the mouse cursor over the highlighted word. VoiceOver has “move mouse to VoiceOver cursor” command but it would be neat if MouseKeys had the same functionality.

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Answer 5

andyBall_uk

Level 7

20,516 points

Jan 12, 2006 12:09 AM in response to Nikle

for the example you gave- I use cmd : which brings up the guess spelling box. apologies if that isn't what you meant. In mail I also use cmd . which brings up a list of words which start the same as you've just typed.

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How to access context menu with keyboard?