There’s a macOS convention that pressing Command along with the first letter of a push button will press it. This is most useful for quickly dismissing Save dialog boxes for documents I want to discard.

Screenshot from Outlook for Mac showing a save dialog box above a new email.

In the above screenshot, I activated the modal dialog with Command+W, to close the window. Pressing Command+D here presses the “Discard Changes” button, which means my fingers haven’t left the keyboard to close this window.

Unfortunately, support for this time-saving convention is patchy, with even some of Apple’s own tools ignoring it. The following require a trip to the mouse to dismiss their dialog boxes:

  • Apple TextEdit.app
  • Mozilla Thunderbird
  • More I’m blanking on right now

As much as I’ve begrudgingly switched to Outlook for $reasons, being able to dismiss dialog boxes with the keyboard has already made me far more productive. If you’re a macOS developer, please implement this.