Two Keyboard Maestro macros: one to check the status of “Smart Quotes” and one to toggle it.
(Note: I use the a “standard” US keyboard on Mac OS X. If you use any other keyboard layout, this will will probably not work without being adjusted for your keyboard. This document may not appear correctly if not viewed at UTF-8.)
Smart Quotes are what Mac OS X calls “typographer’s quotes” which are curled instead of the straight variants. “Smart” quotes are great, unless you’re writing HTML or some kind of programming code which requires straight quotes.
- “These are smart double quotes.”
- ‘These are smart single quotes.’
- "These are straight double quotes."
- 'These are straight single quotes.'
You can find this setting in most Mac OS X apps by looking under the Edit » Substitutions menu. This shows them turned on:
And this shows them turned off:
You can disable Smart Quotes system-wide in System Preferences » Keyboard » Text (that’s in 10.9, search System Preferences for “substitutions” to find it in other versions of OS X), but I like being able to use them when I want them, and turning them off when I don’t.
So I created Smart-Quotes-Toggle-On-Off.kmmacros.
Since I’m toggling this on/off, I also need some way to check its current status, so I wrote a macro for that too: Smart-Quotes-Check-Status.kmmacros.
Download the zip file from Github and import them into Keyboard Maestro by double clicking on the .kmmacros files.
By default, the shortcut for checking the status is ⌥+' and will show the current status using an OS X notification.
The shortcut for toggling smart quotes* is ⌃+⌥+⇧+⌘+' which will toggle them (turn them off if they’re on, or turn them on if they’re off) and show an OS X notification to let you know the new status.
(* That seem like a lot of keys, but Caps Lock equals ⌃+⌥+⇧+⌘ on my Mac, thanks to Brett Terpstra’s “A useful Caps Lock key”, so for me I just press Caps Lock+'. I talked about this “Hyper Key” on Mac Power Users episode 181 if you’d like to hear more about it. Of course, you can easily change the shortcuts using Keyboard Maestro, you don’t have to use mine.)
This will only work in apps which use the standard OS X menu for Smart Quotes. Other apps, including TextEdit, Microsoft Word, and at least some versions of Pages, have their own settings for this feature.
Some smart person on Ask Different pointed out that on the U.S. standard keyboard layout:
-
Option + [ = open printer’s quote: “
-
Shift + Option + [ = close printer’s quote: ”
-
Option + ] = open printer’s apostrophe: ‘
-
Shift + Option + ] = close printer’s apostrophe: ’
If you want to muck about with keybindings, you can even remap those keyboard shortcuts.