One of the most annoying things to me about switching over to OSX was that F5 no longer did a full refresh. I do my fair share of web projects, so I’m constantly refreshing pages. For the first month of owning my Mac, I hit F5, nothing happened, and then I begrudgingly grabbed the mouse and clicked the refresh button. I know that ‘command – R’ is the Mac equivalent to F5 for a browser refresh, but I’m just so used to F5 (and I like just hitting one key), so I really wanted to have F5 work as the reload button.

I was complaining to Dan about this and he quite easily walked me through how to make this happen. They say, “Its the little things in life”, and this is one of those little things that makes me smile when I use it. I primarily use Google Chrome, so that is what these instructions are for. A slightly modified version could be worked out to do this in Safari (if you really want that, just leave a comment and I’ll figure out and post the exact steps).

Follow the steps below and you’ll be F5′ing it up just like me.

Open System Preferences (I usually use Spotlight)

Select Keyboard

Select the Keyboard Shortcuts button at the top

Select Application Shortcuts

Select ‘Google Chrome’. Type ‘Refresh This Page’ for the menu title. Press F5 when in the Keyboard shortcut area. Click add.

Now, go straight to Chrome and refresh the page by clicking F5.