One of the best parts of working on a computer is being able to quickly undo any mistakes you make. This includes any undos you do by mistake—the redo button can save you just as much time and effort as the undo button!
But how do you undo and redo on a Mac? We’re here to tell you all the keyboard shortcuts and menu options you need to perform these actions, so you can fix any mistakes you make on your Mac as soon as they happen.
Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Undo and Redo Commands
Very often the fastest way to perform an action on your Mac is to use a keyboard shortcut. Amongst the most important keyboard shortcuts to know are the Undo and Redo shortcuts.
Undo and redo have default keyboard shortcuts that come built into your Mac, and that work in basically all Mac programs.
For undo, that keyboard shortcut is Cmd + Z. For redo, that keyboard shortcut is Shift + Cmd + Z.
It can be useful to have such similar shortcuts, as you’re more likely to remember them. But if you find them too close, or would prefer to have redo not have an additional key involved, you can always remap your Mac keys to change them.
Navigating Menus to Undo and Redo on Mac
Undo and redo aren’t only available from keyboard shortcuts. You can also access and activat them within app menus.
About 99% of the time, you’ll find the undo and redo actions under the Edit menu of a Mac app. Simply click on Edit, and then select Undo or Redo from there to perform the action.
Undo is often listed right above redo, so you don’t go have to go far to find one or the other.
In certain apps, the undo and redo menu listings may tell you what action you’ll be undoing or redoing if you select them. This might be undoing typing or redoing the movement of a file or object.
Apps like Word also have undo and redo buttons in their main app windows, along with having them in the Edit menu. These buttons often look like arcing arrows, the undo one facing left while the redo one facing right.
You can use these buttons to undo and redo any actions you’ve taken on your Mac as well. Not every app will have these buttons, but at least you can always check the Edit menu, and use keyboard shortcuts to perform the actions too!
How to Undo File Deletions
Sometimes something happens that hitting the undo button or keystroke can’t fix. This can include emptying your trash, which permanently deletes files.
Well, mostly permanently. There is a sort of undo you can perform if you’ve deleted a file you didn’t mean to delete.
If you already back up your Mac with Time Machine, you can go into your Time Machine backup disk to find previous versions of the document you deleted and click the Restore button to put the document back on your Mac.
Even if you haven’t plugged in your backup disk for a while, your Mac saves local snapshots every hour once you start using Time Machine. You can go through these snapshots and hit the Restore button there to save files as well.
If you save files to iCloud, you can recover deleted files from there too. Log into iCloud.com and head to Settings, then scroll down to Advanced to find Restore Files.
Find the file you want to bring back from the list that appears, and check the box beside it. Then click on the Restore Files to put it back on your computer.
Other backup software and cloud storage services will offer similar options to Time Machine for file restoration. If you don’t back up your Mac, we highly recommend you start doing that right away so you have these options in the future.
But for files you’ve lost before you start backing things up, there’s still a chance at recovery. Once the Trash is emptied, the deleted files still take up some storage space until your Mac starts overwriting that space when you make and save other documents and data.
So first, don’t use your Mac for much of anything to avoid that overwriting. Next, get some data recovery software to dig down into your Mac and find the file you want to get back.
Once it’s located, you should be able to add the missing file back to your computer via the data recovery software, and use it again as much as you want!
Undo and Redo: Simple But Important Actions
Being able to undo and redo actions you’ve done on your Mac is a major blessing, and something your Mac was designed to allow for in basically all situations.
Mistakes, even severe ones, don’t have to be permanent. So long as you know how to undo and redo, and a little bit about how your computer stores data, you can correct basically any error.
We hope we’ve helped you learn how to do all that, and that you can use your Mac with more confidence knowing that even if you mess up, there are ways to fix it at every turn!