How to change font color with keyboard shortcut on a mac

June 5, 2007 8:40 PM

Is there any way on the mac to change the color of a font through a keyboard shortcut? If there isn't a built-in way is there a way to hack it so that you could?
posted by jeffreyclong to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You might want to mention which program you're using.
posted by zamboni at 8:46 PM on June 5, 2007

Shift command C brings up the color palette, if thats what you want. (i'm guessing only in Cocoa apps)
posted by dhruva at 9:44 PM on June 5, 2007

It entirely depends on what application you're using, so there probably isn't an easy way to "hack it" for everything.

Also: "change the color of a font" doesn't make sense -- the font and color are two independent things. Sounds like you really want to change the color of some block of text, which might be using multiple fonts. Do you want to change the color of the selected text, or the next text to get typed, or both?
posted by xil at 10:54 PM on June 5, 2007

In most OS X programs (except Safari & Firefox, natch), just select some text and press Command-T. That's the font panel. There's a one-click color palette within that.

It's the quickest method I can think of it.
posted by revmitcz at 3:27 AM on June 6, 2007

i don't know exactly since i'm not too swift with it, but I bet there's a way to program a trigger with Quicksilver. I do know enough about Quicksilver to say every mac user owes it to him/herself to try this little program out. So handy. It makes me wish I had cooler things to do with my computer so I could use it more. Here's the quicksilver ebook user's guide. Maybe that will help you if you choose to try it out.
posted by Soulbee at 11:01 AM on June 6, 2007

Response by poster: I was meaning changing the color of some text after highlighting it. I was thinking about text editors like textedit and word processors like Pages and Bean which seem to use the same keyboard shortcuts. And having a specific shortcut that changed the text to red and a different shortcut for blue rather then following the shortcut to go to the color pallet and manually changing it there

Thanks
posted by jeffreyclong at 2:33 PM on June 6, 2007