Is it possible to remove a built-in shortcut from an application in Mac OS X?

Solution 1:

You have two options:

• Set the worthless formatting menu item's shortcut to something difficult to press instead, thereby freeing CmdShiftS.

• Run the following in Terminal to remove the shortcut from the menu item labeled Worthless Formatting Shortcut:

  defaults write com.vendor.yourapp NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Worthless Formatting Shortcut" nil
  

It doesn't work in all applications (prominent example: Microsoft Office), but it should work in all well-behaved Cocoa applications.

To find out what your application uses for com.vendor.yourapp, right-click the application bundle, select Show Package Contents, navigate to Contents, open Info.plist using a text editor, or better a property list editor like Property List Editor or Xcode 4 (both part of Apple's developer tools) and look for CFBundleIdentifier or the like.