Mission Control Keyboard Shortcuts and Aperture

I worte this hint for Mac OS X Hints, so it’s a bit genernic, but it applies to Aperture (as that’s what caused me to write the hint.) In Lion keyboard shortcuts to switch spaces (now “Desktops”) conflict with the Browser shortcuts for star ratings, rejcts, etc. Rather than change my long Aperture shortcuts, I wanted to remove the ones for Mission Control. Unfortunately, it’s not very obvious.

So, here’s the hint:

Mission Control includes keyboard shortcuts for each space which use the Control key (^) and Control-Option (^ ⌥). These keys can conflict with quite a few high end apps which use many keyboard shortcuts, and turning them off isn’t so obvious. 

Spaces (Now “Desktops,” which I suppose is more accurate…) 1-10 are defined by ^ 1-0 and 11-16 by ^ ⌥ 1-6. These are useful to know if you regularly use lots of spaces, and are easy to remember.

You can easily turn off ALL Mission Control shortcuts in System Preferences, but the Control Left-right keys are still quite useful, and don’t conflict with many apps.

The trick is to have all the desktops active BEFORE you try to edit keyboard shortcuts if you want to edit just the ones for the desktops.

To turn off just the keys for each space, first go into Mission Control.

Now you’ll need to add the maximum of 16 desktops to remove all the keyboard shortcuts. (If the ^ ⌥ shortcut is good for you, you can reassign all of them as you wish, but you’ll be limited to only 10 number shortcuts.)

To add a space, keep clicking on the semi-transparent desktop in the upper right corner of Mission Control till it won’t let you.

Now go into the Keyboard pane of System Preferences, and go to Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control.

Now you can turn them off as you wish.