Using a Mac with one hand after an injury: a practical setup
· 7 min read
To use a Mac with one hand, make three changes. Turn on Sticky Keys so shortcuts can be pressed one key at a time. Set up the trackpad or mouse so clicking and dragging work from your good hand without a full press and hold. And use dictation for anything longer than a sentence, so your one free hand is not doing all the typing. Everything below is built into macOS and switches back off in seconds when you have two hands again.
A broken wrist, a sling after shoulder surgery or a hand in a cast is usually a matter of weeks. The goal is to get through those weeks without straining the hand you still have.
Sticky Keys: shortcuts one key at a time
Most Mac shortcuts need two or three keys at once, and one-handed that ranges from awkward to impossible. Sticky Keys fixes it.
- Open System Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard.
- Turn on Sticky Keys.
- Click the info button next to it to see its options.
With Sticky Keys on, press Command, let go, then press C, and the Mac treats it as Command-C. A symbol for the held key appears on screen, so you can see what is waiting. Press a modifier twice to lock it down; it stays held until you press it a third time, which helps for a run of Shift-clicks or Command-clicks.
In the options, “Press the Shift key five times to toggle Sticky Keys” lets you turn it on and off without opening Settings. That is handy if you share the Mac with someone who finds it confusing.
One quirk: a single press of Shift now capitalizes only the next letter, and a double press acts like Caps Lock. It takes an hour to stop noticing.
Put the pointer where your good hand is
Trackpad. Open System Settings > Trackpad and turn on “Tap to click”, so a light tap replaces a full press. Under “Secondary click”, choose “Click or Tap with Two Fingers”, or “Click in Bottom Left Corner” or “Click in Bottom Right Corner”, whichever your thumb reaches most easily.
Dragging without holding. Holding a click while moving is the most tiring pointer action with one hand. Go to System Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control, click Trackpad Options, turn on “Use trackpad for dragging” and choose a style. Three-Finger Drag lets you move files and windows by sliding three fingers, with no click at all. With Drag Lock keeps the drag going after you lift your finger, until you tap again.
Mouse. Move the mouse to your good side. If it is Apple’s mouse, System Settings > Mouse lets you set which side gives a secondary click, so a left-handed grip still gets a normal right-click.
Type less with the hand you have
Unlock with your finger, not a password. If your Mac has Touch ID, add a fingerprint from the hand you can use in System Settings > Touch ID & Password. It unlocks the Mac and fills passwords, which saves a lot of one-handed typing in a day.
Text Replacements. In System Settings > Keyboard, click Text Replacements and add short codes for things you type often: an email address, a phone number, a sign-off. Type the code and macOS expands it.
Shortcuts on your side of the keyboard. Undo, cut, copy and paste (Z, X, C and V) sit at the bottom left, next to Command. Q, W and Tab are there too. If your right hand is the free one, use the right-hand Command key, and let Sticky Keys handle the reach.
Dictation for anything longer than a line
One-handed typing is slow, and it puts everything on one wrist. Speaking is faster for most writing, and it rests both hands.
macOS has dictation built in. Turn it on in System Settings > Keyboard > Dictation and choose a shortcut you can reach, such as the microphone key or “Press Control Key Twice”. Start dictation, speak, and the text appears where the cursor is. You can say punctuation out loud; how to dictate punctuation on a Mac lists what works, and what the built-in version can and cannot do is honest about its limits.
Voice Keyboard Pro is built around one held key, which suits one hand well. Hold the key you choose (Left Control by default), speak, release, and the words land at the cursor in any app. Punctuation is inferred from how you speak, commands like “new line” and “undo” work while you dictate, and a personal vocabulary handles names and terms the Mac keeps mishearing. By default, audio goes over an encrypted connection to a transcription provider and is discarded afterwards; Offline Mode in Settings keeps transcription entirely on the Mac. There is a free tier of 5 dictations a day. Pro is a subscription, the only one in our studio, with a 7-day free trial, and it is easy to cancel when the cast comes off. It needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Why a held key beats a toggle explains why that design matters.
Voice Control, for days when the pointer is hard too
Dictation types text. Voice Control, in System Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control, runs the whole Mac by voice: say “Open Mail” to open Mail, “Click Send” to press a button, or “Show numbers” to label every clickable item with a number you can say.
It is worth knowing about for the first few days after an injury, when even a trackpad is uncomfortable. It is also a bigger change than dictation. While it is on, it listens continuously, so say “Go to sleep” to pause it and “Wake up” to resume. Most people use it for a short stretch and then fall back to one hand plus dictation.
Look after the hand you still have
A few habits keep the good hand from becoming the next problem:
- Keep the keyboard and trackpad close to the good side, so you are not reaching across your body.
- Lean on dictation for email and messages, and save the hand for editing and pointing.
- Take breaks. One hand is doing the work of two.
If the good hand starts to ache, treat that as a signal to shift more work to your voice. Dictation for wrist pain and RSI covers a longer-term version of this setup.
When you have both hands back, turn off Sticky Keys, change the dragging style back if you prefer, and keep whatever you found you liked. Plenty of people keep dictation after the cast is gone.
Questions
Does Sticky Keys stop me typing normally? No. Letters type as usual. Only the modifier keys change: they wait for the next key instead of needing to be held.
Does built-in dictation work in every app? It works in most places you can type text. Some apps with unusual text fields do not accept it; if one refuses, try a different app to confirm dictation itself is working.
Is Voice Control the same as dictation? No. Dictation turns speech into text at the cursor. Voice Control controls the Mac itself, and includes dictation as one part of it.