<story><title>Mac keyboard shortcuts</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>awakeasleep</author><text>macOS has discoverability features that obviate the need for the &amp;quot;press alt&amp;quot; feature. You don&amp;#x27;t even need to know what menu contains your target.&lt;p&gt;Command-? (command shift &amp;#x2F;) opens the help menu with fast incremental search through all menubar items, showing you the shortcut of what you&amp;#x27;re interested in, and also allowing you to tap return to substitute the shortcut.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;On Windows (and mostly in Linux too), I can navigate the entire system, application menus and UI controls without touching the mouse or trackpad, relying only on the keyboard.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also far more discoverable --- if you press Alt, accidentally or otherwise, the menu highlights and you can immediately use the arrow keys to navigate it. The underlined letters (sadly missing by default in later Windows versions) also make things more obvious.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also this oddity:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;superuser.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;59007&amp;#x2F;enter-to-open-a-file-in-finder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;superuser.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;59007&amp;#x2F;enter-to-open-a-file-i...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In just about every other graphical file explorer I&amp;#x27;ve ever used, including the DOS ones, Enter opens the selected item. In the Mac Finder, it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;Command-O&lt;/i&gt;. Yes, I get the fact that it&amp;#x27;s mnemonic with the others in that list, but it&amp;#x27;s completely contrary to the customary and rapidly learned behaviour of navigating using the arrow keys and Enter ---which is located very close to the arrow keys, and requires only one hand to operate easily.</text></item><item><author>AnonHP</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s shocking to me how far ahead MacOS is in terms of keyboard shortcuts compared to all other operating systems.&lt;p&gt;I agree with your other points (including easier customizability), but have to completely disagree with this quoted sentence.&lt;p&gt;In my experience of using macOS&amp;#x2F;OS X&amp;#x2F;Mac OS X as well as Windows and Linux, macOS is one OS where a user cannot avoid using the mouse or trackpad!&lt;p&gt;On Windows (and mostly in Linux too), I can navigate the entire system, application menus and UI controls without touching the mouse or trackpad, relying only on the keyboard. The same on a Mac would be frustrating because keyboard navigation, especially for menus, is cumbersome. There are many Apple apps that cannot be completely controlled just using the keyboard either. There are many UI controls (including in dialogs) that just need a mouse or keyboard. When I find these instances, for me it&amp;#x27;s like death by a thousand paper cuts (note: I do have preferences set to navigate through all controls when hitting Tab).&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with my assessment, please try this using only the keyboard (no mouse or trackpad) and see how cumbersome it is (not to mention inconsistent in certain ways with the rest of the system too):&lt;p&gt;* Open System Preferences&lt;p&gt;* Open the Keyboard settings (just an example)&lt;p&gt;* Navigate from one tab to another within the settings&lt;p&gt;Of course, I&amp;#x27;d like to know how something like this can be done faster using the keyboard.</text></item><item><author>whywhywhywhy</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s shocking to me how far ahead MacOS is in terms of keyboard shortcuts compared to all other operating systems. There absolutely has been some people there who deeply care and think long and hard about how experts use their systems even if the actual main company doesn&amp;#x27;t care so much about that segment anymore.&lt;p&gt;Everything just makes sense logically and mnemonically like using shift to invert actions like cmd+z and cmd+shift+z rather than having ctrl+z and ctrl+y for undo&amp;#x2F;redo.&lt;p&gt;Then add to this the ability to rebind any shortcuts in any app at an OS level. It&amp;#x27;s a little frustrating because I&amp;#x27;m trying to move my computing away from Apple because I&amp;#x27;m no longer convinced they care about Macs in the long term but just really wish either Microsoft would have the guts to throw a lot of their legacy out and fix all this stuff or that there were some way to actually achieve this level of coherence across the whole system on Linux.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>It’s a nice feature; a shame that it’s not discoverable (i.e. something people would think to look for when they need it, if they hadn&amp;#x27;t used it before.)&lt;p&gt;Personally, if I were designing it, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have exposed it as a separate bar in the Help menu of the app; but rather just made it an API provider to the OS (sort of like how drag-and-drop data sources work), such that the OS search (Spotlight) could be made a &amp;quot;universal&amp;quot; search, capable of searching &lt;i&gt;both&lt;/i&gt; the OS generally, &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; the currently-focused application specifically.&lt;p&gt;While I&amp;#x27;m dreaming, imagine if you could go into Mission Control and start typing, and it&amp;#x27;d highlight&amp;#x2F;focus the set of windows that &amp;quot;have&amp;quot; the text you&amp;#x27;re looking for (even if not necessarily scrolled into their viewport.) Like the search you can do in Safari&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;tab overview&amp;quot; by pressing Cmd+F there, but across all windows of all apps. Once you&amp;#x27;ve narrowed it down to one window, press Enter and that window will pop to the foreground—perhaps with that text pre-selected as if you had done a Cmd+F search within the app.&lt;p&gt;Or, something even less likely to happen: imagine if you could move your mouse by searching across the corpus of text &lt;i&gt;visibly on-screen&lt;/i&gt; (presumably via interaction with the OS text-rendering layer), such that you could jump the cursor to a specific button; or even to the checkbox with a specific label.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mac keyboard shortcuts</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>awakeasleep</author><text>macOS has discoverability features that obviate the need for the &amp;quot;press alt&amp;quot; feature. You don&amp;#x27;t even need to know what menu contains your target.&lt;p&gt;Command-? (command shift &amp;#x2F;) opens the help menu with fast incremental search through all menubar items, showing you the shortcut of what you&amp;#x27;re interested in, and also allowing you to tap return to substitute the shortcut.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;On Windows (and mostly in Linux too), I can navigate the entire system, application menus and UI controls without touching the mouse or trackpad, relying only on the keyboard.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also far more discoverable --- if you press Alt, accidentally or otherwise, the menu highlights and you can immediately use the arrow keys to navigate it. The underlined letters (sadly missing by default in later Windows versions) also make things more obvious.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also this oddity:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;superuser.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;59007&amp;#x2F;enter-to-open-a-file-in-finder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;superuser.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;59007&amp;#x2F;enter-to-open-a-file-i...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In just about every other graphical file explorer I&amp;#x27;ve ever used, including the DOS ones, Enter opens the selected item. In the Mac Finder, it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;Command-O&lt;/i&gt;. Yes, I get the fact that it&amp;#x27;s mnemonic with the others in that list, but it&amp;#x27;s completely contrary to the customary and rapidly learned behaviour of navigating using the arrow keys and Enter ---which is located very close to the arrow keys, and requires only one hand to operate easily.</text></item><item><author>AnonHP</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s shocking to me how far ahead MacOS is in terms of keyboard shortcuts compared to all other operating systems.&lt;p&gt;I agree with your other points (including easier customizability), but have to completely disagree with this quoted sentence.&lt;p&gt;In my experience of using macOS&amp;#x2F;OS X&amp;#x2F;Mac OS X as well as Windows and Linux, macOS is one OS where a user cannot avoid using the mouse or trackpad!&lt;p&gt;On Windows (and mostly in Linux too), I can navigate the entire system, application menus and UI controls without touching the mouse or trackpad, relying only on the keyboard. The same on a Mac would be frustrating because keyboard navigation, especially for menus, is cumbersome. There are many Apple apps that cannot be completely controlled just using the keyboard either. There are many UI controls (including in dialogs) that just need a mouse or keyboard. When I find these instances, for me it&amp;#x27;s like death by a thousand paper cuts (note: I do have preferences set to navigate through all controls when hitting Tab).&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with my assessment, please try this using only the keyboard (no mouse or trackpad) and see how cumbersome it is (not to mention inconsistent in certain ways with the rest of the system too):&lt;p&gt;* Open System Preferences&lt;p&gt;* Open the Keyboard settings (just an example)&lt;p&gt;* Navigate from one tab to another within the settings&lt;p&gt;Of course, I&amp;#x27;d like to know how something like this can be done faster using the keyboard.</text></item><item><author>whywhywhywhy</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s shocking to me how far ahead MacOS is in terms of keyboard shortcuts compared to all other operating systems. There absolutely has been some people there who deeply care and think long and hard about how experts use their systems even if the actual main company doesn&amp;#x27;t care so much about that segment anymore.&lt;p&gt;Everything just makes sense logically and mnemonically like using shift to invert actions like cmd+z and cmd+shift+z rather than having ctrl+z and ctrl+y for undo&amp;#x2F;redo.&lt;p&gt;Then add to this the ability to rebind any shortcuts in any app at an OS level. It&amp;#x27;s a little frustrating because I&amp;#x27;m trying to move my computing away from Apple because I&amp;#x27;m no longer convinced they care about Macs in the long term but just really wish either Microsoft would have the guts to throw a lot of their legacy out and fix all this stuff or that there were some way to actually achieve this level of coherence across the whole system on Linux.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jjoonathan</author><text>Also: The menu opened by Command-? can be browsed using Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N, like emacs, instead of the up and down keys if you want to move your hands less.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a killer combination, allowing you to run menu items with merely a vague notion of their name rather than a memorized jumble of modifier keys.</text></comment>