how to add a hotkey for the ‘About’ menu

I often need to check version numbers of apps I’m using from the ‘About’ menu. However, unlike ‘Preferences’, ‘Hide’ and ‘Quit’, the About menu doesn’t have a default hotkey.

Normally, it’s no problem to add a menu hotkey through System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, but you can’t do that for the ‘About’ menu. That’s because the Shortcuts requires an exact menu name, and the ‘About’ menu is actually postfixed with the name of each app, so there’s no way to specify the menu universally.

However, we can solve the problem with a little AppleScript, which we can then make into a Service (via Automator) or add to a script runner like FastScripts.

The script is quite simple, but does require System Events, and that means you need to make sure that System Events itself or the app that’s going to run the script has Assistive Access allowed in System Preferences’ Privacy pane.

The raw text for the script is available from my pastebin here.

Enjoy! 🙂

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