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I want to bind a gesture in BetterTouchTool to the shut down menu that is invoked by pressing the power button on my MacBook Air.

It's fairly simple to bind gestures to keyboard shortcuts, so what I'm really looking for is a way to bind a keyboard shortcut to the shut down menu. You can't use the power button in BetterTouchTool, so I need to bind it to a standard keyboard shortcut such as Command+Shift+S.

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  • Another option would be to assign a shortcut to tell application "System Events" to shut down.
    – Lri
    Aug 18, 2012 at 19:39

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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You don't need to map the power button, that menu is already mapped to control+eject

Other useful shutdown/restart/logoff key mappings are below which might be of interest too

Prompt to save work and restart the Mac - Control+Command+Eject

Prompt to save work and shutdown the Mac - Control+Option+Command+Eject

Sleep - Command+Option+Eject

Sleep displays - Shift+Control+Eject

If the computer isn't responding and you need to force it to power off, you can hold down the power button for 6 seconds, you'll lose unsaved work though.

These power shortcuts are listed on the apple support pages

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  • Nice, thanks. Where can I get the full list of such keyboard shortcuts?
    – Senseful
    Feb 7, 2011 at 0:31
  • Any ideas how to get an eject button, if you ahve a non-mac keyboard?
    – Chris Quenelle
    Feb 7, 2011 at 5:00
  • I think F12 will work as an eject button if you hold it for about 2 seconds but I don't know if it will work with these keyboard shortcuts.
    – conorgriffin
    Feb 7, 2011 at 9:00
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Command Shift / will trigger the help menu. Press -> to get to the shutdown menu. Then you can scroll up to the shutdown option. Done.

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    Not what the OP asked for but exactly what I needed. Thanks for posting.
    – Tom Auger
    Oct 22, 2019 at 13:57
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While @Griffo's suggestion is useful, unfortunately the eject button cannot be used in BetterTouchTool.

In order to get it to work with BetterTouchTool, I did the following:

  1. Created a new shortcut in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts for All Applications with the menu title Shut Down... and I chose my own keyboard shortcut.
  2. I then bound a shortcut key in BetterTouchTool to this new keyboard shortcut.

It works as expected. The only drawback is that there are now two Shut Down options in the menu: Shut Down and Shut Down... It's a minor annoyance which I'm not sure how to fix.

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  • Worked, and like you, got the weird doubling up of the menu item, regardless of whether I typed Shut Down, Shut Down... (three periods) or Shut Down… (ellipsis - Opt+;). I should like to note: if you want to apply your changes, you must close the Keyboard control panel (you won't see the menu update until you do).
    – Tom Auger
    Oct 22, 2019 at 14:17

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