Obsidian keyboard shortcuts for Mac

Obsidian draws a line that no other note-taking app bothers with, and it explains almost every argument about its shortcuts. Hotkeys are customisable keyboard combinations attached to Obsidian commands — opening a file, inserting a template, toggling a plugin. Editing shortcuts are the text-editing and navigation keys, and Obsidian's own documentation says outright that these come from your operating system or the framework Obsidian is built on and cannot be customised inside the app.

That is why you can rebind ⌘P but not ⌥←. It is also why a published Obsidian shortcut list is often half right: the editing half is stable and documented per platform, while the hotkey half depends entirely on which core plugins are enabled and what the person writing the list had rebound.

The fastest way to see what a command is actually bound to on your machine is the command palette itself — find the command and the hotkey is printed beside it. Settings, then Hotkeys, lists and edits every one of them, and a filter there shows only the commands that have a binding at all.

These four are the whole reason Obsidian can be driven without a pointer. ⌘P runs any command by name, ⌘O opens any note by name, and ⌘⇧F searches the vault. Between them they cover most of what the sidebar exists for.

The quick switcher has one detail worth knowing: with a note highlighted in the list, ⌘⏎ opens it in a new tab rather than replacing what you are reading. That is the difference between following a link and losing your place.

Obsidian's tabs behave like a browser's, and the switching chords are the browser ones — with one deliberate exception. Moving between tabs uses ⌃⇥ rather than ⌘, because ⌘1 through ⌘9 are already taken by jumping to a tab by position.

The modifier table below is the part people miss entirely. Which modifier you hold while clicking a link decides whether it opens in the same tab, a new tab, a new tab group beside the current one, or a separate window — and that is four different layouts from one click.

This is the table Obsidian publishes per platform, and the macOS column is not a translation of the Windows one — the delete-to-line-start and delete-to-line-end commands exist only on the Mac side, where ⌘ is free because word movement uses ⌥.

⌘⇧K is the entry to memorise. With nothing selected it deletes the whole current line, which in a bullet-heavy note is the difference between editing and re-typing. ⌘C and ⌘X do something similar with no selection: they take the whole paragraph.

The movement keys follow the standard macOS model — ⌥ for a word, ⌘ for a line — and then extend it: ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ go to the beginning and end of the note rather than the line above or below.

Fn↑ and Fn↓ page through a long note. On a Mac keyboard without a dedicated Page Up and Page Down block, Fn with an arrow is those keys.

Selection is movement with ⇧ added, with one asymmetry worth flagging: extending the selection by a page uses ⌃⇧↑ and ⌃⇧↓ rather than the Fn keys that move by a page. That is not a typo in Obsidian's documentation — it is the framework underneath.

Escape is the one to remember when a selection has got away from you. Obsidian calls it simplify selection, and it collapses multiple cursors and stray ranges back to one.

Multiple cursors in Obsidian are a modifier-plus-click affair rather than a chord: ⌥ and a click adds another cursor, and ⇧⌥ while dragging makes a rectangular selection down consecutive lines — which is how a run of paragraphs becomes a list without touching any of them individually.

Folding is the one important feature with no default hotkey at all. Obsidian's documentation is explicit that if you want to fold from the keyboard, you assign hotkeys to the Fold less and Fold more commands yourself; out of the box, folding whole documents runs through the command palette.

Obsidian is a screencast subject that punishes silence. The effect of a hotkey is usually a panel appearing, a note switching, or a block changing shape — all of which look like the app doing something on its own. Worse, most people watching have a different set of hotkeys to yours, so a bare demonstration teaches them a chord that may not exist on their machine unless you show it.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app, for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, that draws each key you press as a mechanical keycap on top of everything else. It has no Obsidian integration and no community plugin — nothing is installed into the vault, and nothing touches your notes. It is a window above your other windows, which is exactly why a screen recorder or a whole-screen share picks it up.