Leopard Tip: Re-Map Your Contact List Shortcuts In iChat

In the twelve short hours that I’ve been using the retail version of Leopard, I’ve discovered a small, easily overlooked, yet very handy feature in iChat. It is now possible to customize the shortcut order for your accounts/contact lists without having to use Chax or some other enhancer. Not only does this allow you to prioritize the order of your contact lists, it also lets you change the default list that appears when you click on the iChat icon in the dock.

Say you’re like me, and you have multiple accounts in iChat – an AIM screen name, Bonjour, and a couple Jabber/Google Talk accounts.

Note the order they appear in the Accounts pane of the Preferences window. This order directly corresponds to the shortcut that will display each contact list. According to the picture above, Command+1 should display my AIM buddy list, Command+2 for Jabber, and Command+3 for Bonjour contacts. A quick look at the Window menu confirms this.

To change the order of the shortcut keys, just drag the account names around. Command+1 is the first (top) account in the list, Command+2 the second, and so on. As you could probably guess, iChat supports up to nine shortcuts in this manner. Oh yeah, the first account in the list will be the one that shows when you click on the iChat icon in the dock.