Mail.app “Show Message Viewer” Shortcut
It has long bothered a friend of mine and myself that there isn’t a keyboard shortcut for the “Message Viewer” menu item in Mail.app. Of course there is ⌘-1 to bring up the Inbox, but it only works if the Message Viewer is not minimized. If it is–nothing happens. ⌘-0 brings up Activity Viewer; hardly what we’re looking for. So here I introduce to you ⌘-↩ (command-return) for Mail.app. A small hack you can apply to Mail will bind ⌘-↩ to “Message Viewer” from the Window menu.
Instructions:
EDIT (Aug 13, 2007): Be sure to read the comments before considering executing these–perhaps hackish–instructions.
- Quit Mail. Make a backup copy of Mail.app
- Ctrl-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents, navigate to “Contents/Resources/English.lproj”.
- Replace MailViewer.nib with the one included in the zip file.
- Re-launch Mail.app and enjoy using command-return to bring up the main window.
If you are familiar with Mac OS X programming, you might choose to simply open the MailViewer.nib file from Mail with Interface Builder and edit the keyboard shortcut for the Message Viewer menu option.
A couple notes of caution: The instructions here are for Mac OS X 10.4, with Mail.app version 2.1. Even a minor bug fix in Mail could destroy this modification, or make these steps obsolete. Do not attempt to use the attached .nib file with other versions of Mail.app, especially as it is updated in Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard.
As a side note, in authoring this post I found out how to type special characters and symbols in Mac OS X. It is easy to insert special symbols with the Character Palette, but some symbols I’ve wanted to type directly from the keyboard as I encounter them somewhat often. The key is to turn on “Unicode Hex Input” in the International preference pane, under the Input Menu tab. When this method is selected, any unicode character can be accessed by holding option and typing the 4 digit code. For example, the european point of interest symbol, or command character, can be accessed by typing ⌥-2318.
I was able to find the information about the Unicode Hex Input mode in an article from 2002, and the character codes in a PDF from unicode.org.
Hey leet haxor, nice tip there. Aren’t you violating your NDA though? At any rate I really wished Mail.app supported WebDAV/HTTPS, so I didn’t have to run Microsoft Entourage.
After using Entourage though, it seems like all the synchronization features with Exchange don’t seem possible with Mail.app. But maybe they are, I’m not sure.
Haha, “Abschicken.”
Comment by Jerry — August 13, 2007 @ 3:56 pm
Ha. None of the knowledge used to execute this hack was obtained under any sort of NDA. I would expect any savvy Cocoa programmer to be familiar with the technique, but I appreciate your concern!
I think Exchange support is a little more than just WebDAV/HTTPS protocol, but yes, Mail.app needs exchange support. Maybe one day.
Comment by Joey — August 13, 2007 @ 4:01 pm
I do not recommend modifying the NIB for Mail.app. It disqualifies you from getting the smaller patch version of OS updates ;-)
Instead:
1. Go to Keyboard & Mouse preference pane
2. Keyboard Shortcuts tab
3. Click +
4. Choose Mail
5. Menu item title is “Message Viewer”
6. Choose a hotkey (unfortunately Cmd-Return isn’t allowed)
Comment by Josh Benjamin — August 13, 2007 @ 6:02 pm
Josh,
That is a fine point! This does seem like a better solution for the vast majority of users. Thanks for pointing out this much more reasonable customization.
Comment by Joey — August 13, 2007 @ 6:16 pm
Well regarding the NDA, I meant the .nib file, since didn’t you get that from 10.5?
Comment by Jerry — August 13, 2007 @ 8:13 pm
Jerry,
Nope; it is just the plain old MailViewer.nib from inside the copy of Mail.app likely on your hard disk. If you’ve got the developer tools installed, you can just double click it (once inside the application bundle) to modify it yourself, if you choose.
Comment by Joey — August 14, 2007 @ 3:14 am
My bad, I can’t read and thought you had transplanted some stuff from Tiger :)
Comment by Jerry — August 14, 2007 @ 10:29 am
It worked perfect here . thanks a million !
Comment by tris — December 5, 2007 @ 6:53 am