Quotes And Whitespace

Quotation marks are optional around keystroke sequences. For example, the following commands are equivalent, specifying the keystroke sequence {Ctrl+a}{Ctrl+c}:

Whitespace (any sequence of space, tab, and newline characters) is used to separate actions. But since adjacent keystroke actions are concatenated the following commands are also equivalent, again specifying the keystroke sequence {Ctrl+a}{Ctrl+c}:

Copy All = {Ctrl+a}{Ctrl+c};
Copy All = {Ctrl+a} {Ctrl+c};
Copy All = {Ctrl+a}
           {Ctrl+c};
Copy All = { Ctrl + a }   { Ctrl + c };

Use whitespace to make keystroke sequences more readable, as there's no harm in separating them into multiple actions.

Some characters must be quoted

If you want a keystroke sequence to contain a space character, enclose the sequence in quotes. For example, this command tells Windows Explorer to switch to the "Program Files" folder:

Without the quotes the previous command would try to switch to the "ProgramFiles" folder and would not work correctly.

In addition to whitespace characters, the following characters must appear within quotes when used in a keystroke sequence:

    ( ) [ ] = | , " ' ; #

All other characters may appear without quotes except that ':' may not occur at the end of a keystroke sequence. For example, most pathnames do not need to be quoted, as in this command to open a temporary file:

The examples in this tutorial use quotation marks only where necessary; you might prefer to use them more consistently.

Literal quote and newline characters

If you want a keystroke sequence to contain a newline character use {Enter}, as in this command to insert an email signature line:

If you want a keystroke sequence to contain a single or double quote character the easiest solution is to delimit the sequence with the other type of quote character.

Also note that in a sequence delimited by double quotes, two successive double quote characters are converted to one double quote character (and likewise for single quotes). For example, here are two ways of writing a keystroke sequence containing both single and double quotes: