Assign Keyboard Shortcuts to Avoid Ambiguity
Correspondent David K. turned me on to this trick, which I had never seen before:
As you may know, you can assign Keyboard Shortcuts to application menu commands in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Conventionally, you would select the name of the app, the name of the menu command, and a keyboard shortcut combination in this preference tab. What I didn’t know is that you can designate the precise menu heirarchy for a command by entering something like Top Menu->Submenu->Command, with “->” between each menu title, instead of just the name of the command.
The reason I want to do this in iTunes is that I’d like to set a shortcut for the “Songs” playlist view. But, because the word “Songs” is also in the Controls > Shuffle submenu, simply entering “Songs” in the keyboard shortcut panel would invariably toggle the Shuffle Songs option.
But by entering View->View As->Songs, the keyboard shortcut knows I mean that “Songs” and not the Controls > Shuffle > Songs.
Hoy!
Then I did the same for Playlist view:
The shortcuts also appear adjacent to the commands in their menu.
And an AppleScript could probably fire the shortcut via System Events.