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I don't want to use my trackpad too much due to a strain injury, hence I use the Control F2 "Move Focus to Menu Bar" a lot.

However this feature only works occasionally, it can work for hours and then suddenly stop working, sometimes I can fix in the Keyboard Shortcuts pref pane by unchecking and checking the "Move Focus to Menu Bar" checkbox, at other times it takes a restart of the system.

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I'm a big Apple fan-boy, and I always marvel at the cool features in OSX, this is the first time I have a Windows-esque experience with the OSX UI :(

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  • 4
    This is a 10 year old question and sitting here in 2021 (almost 2022) it's still an issue in Monterey. SMH
    – Art Geigel
    Commented Dec 12, 2021 at 15:30
  • 1
    This is an 11-year-old question and sitting here in 2023 it's still an issue in Ventura. SMH
    – aafulei
    Commented Feb 25, 2023 at 5:48
  • This is a 12 year old question and sitting here in 2024 it's still an issue in Sonoma.
    – GrahamD
    Commented Mar 19 at 20:12
  • This is a 13 year old question and sitting here in 2024 (almost 2025) it's still an issue in Sequoia. SMH
    – Rae
    Commented Nov 10 at 5:30

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
22

When you're sure you've got your Fn key settings the way you want them and it STILL doesn't work:

My solution:

  1. Go back into Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts pane.

  2. For the item "Move focus to the menu bar", assign a DIFFERENT function key, other than F2. (Something you're not using, like, say...^F9...or whatever.)

  3. Now use THAT key instead.

Sounds kind of nuts, I know. And it's annoying to use a different key. But I've found that ^F2 just won't consistently work after I've been using enough 3rd party programs, particularly if they're complex. Sometimes ^F3 will also fail, and that keyboard pane can start acting a little strange on its own to be honest. This does seem to work though.

coder

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  • That seems to work! You're lifesaver, thx a bunch :)
    – timkl
    Commented Apr 27, 2011 at 7:28
  • Well, some time have past and I have the exactly same problem with this approach :(
    – timkl
    Commented Apr 30, 2011 at 17:41
  • 2
    My experience: after if fails with the "new" key mapping, switch it back to the original one, and it typically starts working again. Then I toggle between these two mappings to make it work when one (mapping) starts failing. Which is unfortunately often.
    – Johnny Utahh
    Commented Jan 4, 2015 at 20:03
  • 4
    What an absolute disaster! I'm still seeing this issue on Yosemite.
    – Srikanth
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 14:37
  • I noticed "Move focus to the menu bar" got turned off for some reason after upgrading from El Capitan (10.11) to Sierra (10.12)
    – William Turrell
    Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 8:07
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  • I've had the same struggle with keyboard shortcuts to the menu bar (tried many different combinations).

the only one that has consistently worked is the help shortcut ⇧ ⌘ ? (shift+command+/)

from the help menu just use the arrows to navigate to file/edit/view…

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  • 6
    This works, plus you can just type the command you want to find immediately.
    – justingordon
    Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 23:56
17

Same here: ^F2 almost never works
Workaround that works for me (without assigning new shortcut): press ^F3 and then immediately ^F2

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  • 1
    I've solved this problem by mapping a keycombo with Keyboard Maestro to simulate pressing the Apple icon in the upper left corner of the screen.
    – timkl
    Commented Mar 5, 2012 at 19:13
  • 1
    This crazy seeming way does work - even for remapped shortcut (I use ^; instead of ^F2) . Any idea why?
    – WestCoastProjects
    Commented Aug 23, 2021 at 15:17
  • Yep, seconding the "why?" because it does work.
    – Clumsy cat
    Commented Jul 21, 2022 at 9:26
1

From this other question: Why do Ctrl+F2 and Ctrl+F3 sometimes stop working?

A possible cause is accidentally hitting Ctrl-F1, which (wait for it...) disables Keyboard access! So use it again to toggle these keys back on.

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  • 2
    I'm trying this shortcut for the first time on macOS Ventura, and if you go into Sys Prefs > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Keyboard, you can see clearly that Ctrl-F1 checks/unchecks a bunch of the shortcuts. Except even when they are checked, "Move focus to the menu bar" (Ctrl-F2) does nothing.
    – duozmo
    Commented Dec 30, 2022 at 21:56
  • Hey, so you’re saying that Ctrl-F1 ia definitely not the cause of the problem, at least in your case?
    – O'Rooney
    Commented Jan 3, 2023 at 6:15
  • 1
    Unfortunately, that is what I'm saying.
    – duozmo
    Commented Jan 7, 2023 at 18:20
0

I asked a question in the following link and got a hint to answer your question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16390279/applescript-to-show-apple-menu-bar-items

What I do is as follows:

  1. create an .app using Automator using the scrip in the above link,
  2. create a hot key for the .app,
  3. create a key stroke linked to the hot key (using KeyRemap4MacBook in my case).

It works great for me at least.

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1
  • Or see this question for other ways to assign shortcuts to scripts. Automator applications have a maybe 100-500 ms delay at the start.
    – Lri
    Commented May 6, 2013 at 12:47

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