How to Get Back Your F12 Hotkey in macOS Catalina
- 2 minutes read - 237 wordsApple’s Dashboard is removed from macOS Catalina, 😤.
The Dashboard RIP
I used Dashboard a lot, it is a quite useful tool to me, 😭.
The thing is i lost my F12 global hotkey too
Before Catalina, i use F12 as the hotkey to toggle Dashboard. And after updated to Catalina, with Dashboard removed, you can not reset F12 hotkey in System Preferences anymore; you can not assign F12 in other apps or settings neither.
The fix
Important:
Restart is required after the plist editing to make it work.
Method 1
If you have Xcode installed, enter the following command in Terminal:
open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist
That will open the hotkeys plist file in Xcode, you can then edit it with Xcode. In my case, i want to disable F12 used for Dashboard, so i change enabled key value to NO under 62 and 63 (62, 63 is the hotkey related to Dashboard):
Method 2
You could try enter the following commands in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.symbolichotkeys AppleSymbolicHotKeys -dict-add 62 '<dict><key>enabled</key><false/></dict>'
defaults write com.apple.symbolichotkeys AppleSymbolicHotKeys -dict-add 63 '<dict><key>enabled</key><false/></dict>'
If F12 is not your Dashboard hotkey
please check the following links to get more information:
what do the parameter values in AppleSymbolicHotKeys plist dict represent?
Documenting com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist
Defaults & symbolichotkeys in Mac OS X