Mac Keyboard Symbols Explained: ⌘ ⌥ ⌃ ⇧ and More

Every Mac menu is full of hieroglyphs: ⇧⌘S next to Save As, ⌥⌘W next to Close All. Apple has used these symbols since 1984, never prints most of them on the keyboard itself, and assumes you know them. Here's the full decoder — the four you must know, the rest of the chart, and how to read a shortcut listing left to right.

The four modifiers you'll see constantly

• ⌘ Command — the key next to the space bar, labelled command (older keyboards also show the ⌘ “looped square”). The Mac's main shortcut key; roughly what Ctrl is on Windows.
• ⌥ Option — labelled option (and alt on many models), between Control and Command. The “alternate version of this action” key — and the way you type special characters.
• ⌃ Control — the caret-like symbol. Used less than on Windows, but it powers Mission Control combos and terminal work. Note it is not the ⌘ key.
• ⇧ Shift — the hollow up arrow. In menus it means “add Shift”, and it's why a listing like ⇧⌘4 (screenshot selection) has that 4 printed as a 4, not a $.

A menu listing stacks modifiers before the final key, and you press everything together. ⌥⇧⌘V reads as Option+Shift+Command+V: hold the three modifiers, tap V. macOS lists them in a consistent order (Control, Option, Shift, Command) — your fingers don't have to match the order, only the combination.

The rest of the chart

• ⇪ Caps Lock — Shift's arrow with a tail. Rare in shortcuts, common in remapping discussions.
• fn / 🌐 Globe — the bottom-left key on Mac laptops. Menus in newer macOS versions show the globe for shortcuts like “fn E” (emoji picker).
• ⏎ Return — sometimes drawn ↩. The main “confirm” key. Apple distinguishes it from ⌤ Enter, the numeric-keypad enter (on laptops, Fn+Return).
• ⌫ Delete — backspace-style delete, erasing to the left. ⌦ is forward delete, erasing to the right (Fn+Delete on laptops).
• ⇥ Tab — and its reverse ⇤ (Shift+Tab), for moving through fields.
• ⎋ Escape — the “break out” symbol, top-left key. Appears in force-quit listings (⌥⌘⎋).
• ⏏ Eject — on older keyboards with optical drives; survives in a few sleep shortcuts.
• ⇞ Page Up / ⇟ Page Down, ↖ Home / ↘ End — full-size keyboards have real keys; laptops use Fn plus the arrow keys.
• ↑ ↓ ← → — the arrow keys, printed as-is.

Where you'll meet these symbols

Three places, mainly: menus (every shortcut an app offers is printed at the right edge of its menu item — the fastest way to learn an app is to read its menus), System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts (where you can change most of them), and documentation or forum posts. Menus are also the ground truth when a shortcut “doesn't work”: if the menu shows a different combo than you expected, the app or a custom setting rebound it.

If you want to see the symbols live, open the Keyboard Viewer (enable the input menu under System Settings → Keyboard → Text Input → Edit… → Show Input menu in menu bar, then choose Show Keyboard Viewer) — press a modifier and watch the on-screen keys change.

Typing the symbols yourself

Need ⌘ or ⌥ in a document? They're ordinary Unicode characters. Press Ctrl+Cmd+Space to open the character picker and search “command”, “option”, or “shift” — or search “place of interest” for ⌘, its official Unicode name. Copy once, paste forever; there is no direct key for typing them.

The Option key's second job

⌥ isn't just a modifier — it types an entire hidden character set: é, °, €, –, and dozens more. See the Option key symbols cheat sheet for the full map.