Full Screen Shortcut

One of the things missing from Lion’s full-screen support is a standardized keyboard shortcut for switching modes. Before Lion, it was entirely up to developers to implement the behavior, appearance, and activation mechanisms for entering full-screen mode. Now, we are treated to standard “Enter Full Screen” buttons on qualified windows, and with standard “Enter Full Screen” and “Exit Full Screen” menu items for toggling modes. But there’s still no standardized shortcut.

Early in my testing of Lion, I decided to fix this using Apple’s mechanism for redefining keyboard shortcuts of specifically named menu items. For me, Cmd-Ctrl-Return makes a good toggle shortcut for switching any given app or window between regular and full-screen modes.

To do the same on your OS X Lion machine:

Open System Preferences.

Click the “Keyboard” preference pane.

Switch to the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab.

Click the “+” button to add new shortcuts for “Enter Full Screen” and “Exit Full Screen”.

I find myself more likely to embrace full-screen mode and switch in and out fluidly when I can do so with a standard keyboard shortcut.

Update: Eric Schlegel points out on Twitter that Cmd-Ctrl-F is the “standard” for full-screen mode, but that some Apple apps don’t follow the standard. Perhaps that would be a better choice for this global setting as well.