How To Remap Cmd-I To Avoid Opening the Mail App on a Mac

Something changed recently with respect to keyboard mappings on my Mac. A few days ago, I was writing a post, and hit the Cmd-I key to put my editor in italics mode. Instead, the Mail App opened up and a copy of what I had written had been pasted into a blank email message. That was odd. I closed the mail app, and tried again but the same thing happened. So I highlighted the text I wanted to italicize and clicked the Italics icon. That was a bit of a pain because I am a keyboard guy and have been using a form of Cmd (or CTRL)-I for decades to start and stop italics mode in editors.

I forgot about this until the next time I wanted to italicize text. The same thing happened. Instead of putting the editor into italics mode, the Mail App popped up again. Over the next several days, this continued to happen, and I eventually expressed mild frustration on Twitter:

I think the latest update to MacOS 11.5 changed some keyboard mappings. Every time I hit CMD-i to italicize something, it suddenly launches the Mail App. I must have accidentally launched the Mail app 25 times already this morning. Maybe I use too much italics in my #writing.

— Jamie Todd Rubin (@jamietr) July 24, 2021

Over the next five days, I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened. Clearly something has changed, either in a recent update of MacOS, or a recent update of Safari. In any case, I was frustrated enough to try to figure out how to stop this from happening this morning since the post I was writing (you’ll see it Saturday) had lots of italics. After some searching and trial and error, I figured out how to prevent this from happening. Here is what worked for me in case anyone is having the same problem. (Note: this applies to Safari):

1. Open System Preferences
2. Go to Keyboard preferences
3. Go to the Shortcuts tab,
4. Click App Shortcuts on the sidebar
5. Add a new App Shortcut by clicking the + icon
6. Give the shortcut the following name: “Email This Page”
7. Assign the shortcut a keyboard command that you are unlikely to use in the future; I gave mine the following: Shift-CTRL-OPTION-CMD-I
8. Restart Safari

After I did this, whenever I hit Cmd-I in my WordPress editor, it actually went into italics mode, instead of launching the Mail app. Somehow, something in Safari changed to use Cmd-I to open the Mail app. By remapping that function to another key combination, it eliminated the problem.

The article I found that pointed me in the right direction was for MacOS 10.15 (Catalina), but I swear this just began happening on my system in the last few weeks, and I think it was after I updated to 11.5.