Mojave Finder: what does Cmd-L do?

TidBITS Talk
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Cmd-L used to be Make Alias, but that’s somethign else now. On Mojave though, if I hit cmd-L in the Finder I see the Edit menu blink, but I can’t see any entry in that menu associated with cmd-L. I also note that the menu only blinks when nothing’s selected. If an item is selected, the menu doesn’t blink and cmd-L appears to do nothing. :confused:

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Gruber talked about this in a footnote a while back:

“While I’m in full-on you-kids-get-the-hell-off-my-lawn mode here, let me mention another Mojave gripe that is clearly the work of young developers at Apple. The Finder’s File → Show Original command has had the shortcut ⌘R since, I think, System 6. (Select an alias or symlink and this command will reveal the original file.) File → Make Alias was ⌘L. In Mojave, ⌘R has inexplicably been remapped to Rotate Right and ⌘L to Rotate Left. (These seem to be invisible menu items in the Edit menu? They’re not menu items, but the Edit menu highlights when you invoke them.) The shortcut for Make Alias is now ⌤⌘A and Show Original is now ⌤⌥⌘A. In and of themselves these new shortcuts aren’t bad, I suppose, but these are awfully longstanding shortcuts to change. And, I’ll add, the new shortcuts don’t even match the ones in Photos, where they’re named Rotate Counterclockwise (⌘R) and Rotate Clockwise (⌥⌘R). Photos’s shortcuts, where rotating in the other direction is an Option-key variant rather using an entirely different letter, seem more Mac-like to me. Preview, on the other hand, uses the commands names Rotate Left and Rotate Right, and the same ⌘L and ⌘R as the Mojave Finder. I give up.”

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Nonstop whining about how Apple sucks

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Now on to fixing this. Is there a way to remap Mojave Finder cmd-L to say Make Alias without resorting to 3rd-party Finder extensions? I know you can define key combos for menu items in Sys Prefs, but can you use the same tools to remap key combos of existing menu items to other items?

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Yes, you can.

In Preferences->Keyboard->Shortcuts, click the ‘+’ to add a shortcut. Then in the new box, select the Finder app, enter Make Alias in the Menu Title box, and type the new shortcut in the Keyboard shortcut box. I’ve done a similar thing for All Appications for resurrecting Save As….

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Thanks, Alan. That’s great. :slight_smile: