Modifier Key Order for Keyboard Shortcuts

Dr. Drang, back in 2017:

If you write about Mac keyboard shortcuts, as I did yesterday, you should know how to do it right. Just as there’s a proper order for adjectives in English, there’s a proper order for listing the modifier keys in a shortcut.

I haven’t found any documentation for this, but Apple’s preferred order is clear in how they show the modifiers in menus and how they’re displayed in the Keyboard Shortcuts Setting.

The order is similar to how you see them down at the bottom left of your keyboard. Control (⌃), Option (⌥), and Command (⌘) always go in that order. The oddball is the Shift (⇧) key, which sneaks in just in front of Command.

Perhaps this wasn’t documented in 2017, but at least since 2022 (per the Internet Archive), Apple has documented the correct order for modifier keys in a keyboard shortcut in their excellent Apple Style Guide, under the entry for “key, keys”:

If there’s more than one modifier key, use this order: Fn (function), Control, Option, Shift, Command. When a keyboard shortcut includes a mouse or trackpad action, use lowercase for the mouse or trackpad action.

• Option-click
• Option-swipe with three fingers

There’s all sorts of good stuff in this Style Guide entry, including an explanation for why the shortcut for Zoom Out is ⌘- (using the lower of the two symbols on the “-/_” key) but the shortcut for Zoom In is ⌘+ (using the upper of the two symbols on the “=/+” key):

If one of the characters on the key provides a mnemonic for the action of the command, you can identify the key by that character.

While I’m at it, here’s a pet peeve of mine. When you write out a keyboard shortcut using modifier key names, you connect them with hyphens: Command-R. But when using the modifier glyphs, you should definitely not include the hyphens. ⌘C is correct, ⌘-C is wrong. For one thing, just look at the shortcuts in the menu bar — the shortcut for Copy has been shown as ⌘C since 1984. For another, consider the aforementioned shortcuts that most apps use for Zoom In and Zoom Out: ⌘+ and ⌘-. Both of those would look weird if connected by a hyphen, but Zoom Out in particular would look confusing: Command-Hyphen-Hyphen?.

(How do you write those out using words, though? Apple uses “Command-Plus Sign (+)” and “Command-Minus Sign (-)”. Me, I’d just go with “Command-Plus” and “Command-Minus”.)

Pay no attention to Drang’s follow-up post, or this one from Jason Snell. The correct order is Fn, Control, Option, Shift, Command — regardless if you’re using the words or the glyphs.