Hidden Keyboard Shortcut to Use Link Previews in Safari for Mac
By default, in Safari, Mac users can view link previews in separate windows to get a look at the website they’re about to visit without having to click through them. This can be handy for checking titles or other content before deciding whether to click a link, but the feature has never worked reliably on my Mac. It’s supposed to be triggered by a hard press or three-finger click on the trackpad, but both inputs can be finicky enough that I don’t use the link preview at all. That changed recently thanks to app developer Jeff Johnson, who discovered a keyboard shortcut that Apple never disclosed that reliably launches Safari link previews on Mac .
Safari link preview shortcut key
When you ‘re using Safari on your Mac , hover your mouse over any link and press Command-Control-D . The link preview should appear every time. It’s still a little wonky because you can’t easily close the link preview by pressing the Esc key on your Mac’s keyboard, but you can click anywhere outside the preview to close it.
Thanks to this shortcut, I no longer have to open links in Safari’s background tab for later viewing. Additionally, it is now much easier to open link previews when using an external mouse, where force clicking and three-finger tapping are not possible. You can also use it on individual words to open Look Up , which shows the definition of the word as well as many other search results for it.
Note that link preview works as intended in Safari for iPhone: you can tap and hold on any link to view it.
Before viewing any link, it is important to remember that you should take the same precautions as when opening the link, as the preview will still load all of the page content, including images and code.
By the way, Johnson is the developer of the excellent StopTheMadness Safari extension , which makes web browsing much more convenient . The extension stops ads from automatically playing on websites, removes tracking information from URLs, warns you when you’ve exceeded the character limit when creating passwords for certain websites, and can also re-enable copy and paste on websites. who are blocking it.