Restore Safari’s Downloads Keyboard Shortcut

I’m pretty excited about most of the enhancements in OS X Lion, and in Safari 5.1, which was released along with it. But one of the most annoying changes in the version of Safari that ships with Lion is the removal of any keyboard shortcut for showing and hiding the active downloads list.

Downloads used to be shown in a completely separate window, which could be toggled using the keyboard shortcut Cmd-Opt-L. In Lion, they appear in a popover panel attached to the toolbar of whatever browser window you happen to be using. Unfortunately, there is no keyboard shortcut to toggle the appearance of this popover.

Using FastScripts and a simple UI Scripting script, I was able to restore this functionality, so that Safari on Lion toggles the panel using the familiar Cmd-Opt-L shortcut.

Download the “Toggle Downloads Popover” script

Download the script, and copy it to:

[Home] -> Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> Safari

Here it will show up in FastScripts (or Apple’s script menu) only when Safari is the front-most app. You can also assign it a keyboard shortcut, like Cmd-Opt-L, that will only be active when Safari is active.

Important: If your Mac is not configured to run with English as the primary language, the script will not work without a minor adjustment. You will need to open up the script and change the text string “Downloads” to the language-specific description for the downloads panel in your language. For example, to make it work with Safari running in Spanish, you would change the string to “Descargas”.

I find it very useful to be able to popup the panel when I am checking on the status of a long download, or when I want to check quickly whether I already downloaded something I had intended to. Hope this script works well for you as well!