10 ms·

Mac: Keyboard Shortcuts Killed by Bug

114 points by bkudria 7y ago

tomcam 7y ago
Apple used to be pretty good with Mac accessibility. Now, not so much.
- jbverschoor 7y ago
  And overall power usage. I think I probably know more shortcuts and optimizations on macOS than most people at Apple.
  - arthurcolle 7y ago
    Have any tricks you want to share? My MBP 15" gets 2 hr tops unless its plugged in. Even with "mere" web browsing
    - jerf 7y ago
      Power usage, as in power user, as in "skilled user of software".
      - arthurcolle 7y ago
        Yikes I'm an idiot
    - gumby 7y ago
      That’s a battery problem if so and I’d get it fixed. A new MBP should get something like 10 hours of browsing (presumably Apple claims more)
    - robenkleene 7y ago
      Click the battery indicator in your menu bar and see which apps are listed as "using significant energy"? Go one level deeper and open "Activity Monitor" and look at the energy impact for the apps you are using. Unless you use Safari, which is wonderfully energy-effecient, then the most likely culprit is your web browser, especially if you're using Google Chrome. Personally, I'd use Safari over Chrome for the energy efficiency alone, but I understand people have different priorities. You can also check the health of your battery by doing "Apple Menu" -> "About This Mac" -> "System Report…" and then selecting "Power" in the side bar. (Google for the expected charge capacity for your laptop model.)
    - jbverschoor 7y ago
      Haha. yeah not sureif that was me or a typo + autocorrect Try clicking the battery icon ;-)
js2 7y ago
This bug is much more subtle that the author describes. I use keyboard shortcuts semi-regularly so I would've noticed this bug, especially if it had been around since 10.13. I never noticed it, but then I realized the author's screenshots are all dark themed. I use the light theme and cannot reproduce it under 10.14.4 with light theme. If I toggle to dark theme, I can reproduce it, but not in a consistent way. Depending upon how I add and remove shortcuts and toggle themes, I can get just the last shortcut to display incorrectly, or all of them to display incorrectly, or none of them to. It's some odd interaction between dark/light themes and this panel.
- smnscu 7y ago
  I mean, they also had this bug for ages: > There is, still, a long-standing MacOS bug where your balance may drift when volume buttons are pressed while CPU is under heavy load. https://github.com/jamsinclair/ballast https://github.com/jamsinclair/ballast https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/ https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/
  - on_and_off 7y ago
    ohhh ! that's what happened ! I had this happen to me a couple of month ago. I thought that my headphones were busted until I realized that OsX had decided to mess with the balance for no reason.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
jmull 7y ago
I tried this and for me, it's a minor bug. Upon adding the third shortcut, the display of the "menu" name, indeed, shows as an ellipsis. But: (1) the name is still visible through a tool tip (2) when I close the window and reopen, thingS display fine. (If I start editing again, I can get some weird ellipsis display again, though now by deleting items rather than add thing them) Anyway, definitely a bug, but at least for me it's pretty easy to work around, so a pretty minor bug in a minor feature.
freditup 7y ago
It's a bug for sure, but conclusions like this are over the top for a single small bug: > This isn’t an Apple which has any concern over the quality of its products, or for its users. It’s just another leviathan corporation which has stopped caring or taking pride. One small bug reveals a deep and pervasive problem. I'd rather see a more measured approach to drawing conclusions from a single anecdote.
- duxup 7y ago
  Yeah the "Apple doesn't care about users" line of thinking for one use case or bug here or there is a bit much. Personally I've introduced bad ... choices because I cared about users a few times. It just was a mistake on my part, and yet the whole time I was thinking "this will be better for the user".
  - slantyyz 7y ago
    >> Yeah the "Apple doesn't care about users" line of thinking for one use case or bug here or there is a bit much. To be fair, a lot of people choose OSX over other OSes because Apple has the reputation of "sweating the details" in both their software and their hardware. Some of those people in particular are now noticing that the attention to detail may not be like it was, so it is unsurprising that some are complaining over seemingly little things even when the product as a whole might still be better than its competitors.
- protomyth 7y ago
  If this was the only item, I would agree with you, but it isn't. Finder is buggy and broken since Mavericks (along with some bugs that look like the got rebroke in [edit]10.14[/edit]). Each new version of Mac OS breaks more stuff. This is exacerbated by their hardware failures and constant "only affects a small number of users" line that gets old. Its a constant stream of breaks these days and they need to start looking at the details.
  - rectang 7y ago
    My 2012 MacBook Pro Retina has been more stable on Mojave than on any previous OS. It used to crash at least once a week; at the moment `uptime` tells me it's been 21 days since a reboot. I attribute this to improvements in the reliability of Airplay: my machine used to be prone to crashing after connecting via Airplay (either sound only or mirroring) to my old Apple TV. I'm sure other things have been broken along the way, but it seems to me like Apple is tackling hard problems at the OS level and making progress.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Wow. Looks like I never ran into this bug because I have one too few App Shortcuts set up (only two custom ones, as opposed to 3+). And this has been in place since Sierra?! Wow! I'm not convinced that Apple actually knows about this bug, but what does that say about their software testing...
frou_dh 7y ago
Bug aside, this from-the-outside-in way of creating keyboard shortcuts is a cool feature, that I bet a minority of even Mac powerusers are aware of. See also "DefaultKeyBinding.dict" for more keyboard behavior possibilities, including stuff like ^W and ^U working in Cocoa text fields.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  One great thing about macOS is that Apple provides a couple of tools to extend existing apps. The other really great one is Automator Services/Quick Actions.
derefr 7y ago
> This isn’t a subtle bug which only occurs in certain circumstances. Sure it is. OP is an outlier in how they use this panel. Most people just use it to enable/disable the built-in menu commands, or to modify their accelerators. One very common use-case for people who speak multiple languages is enabling the keyboard switcher accelerator. I expect that they have extensive tests for common use-cases like that. On the other hand, I expect that the test suite they use probably only tests creating one or two custom keyboard shortcuts using the panel; and doesn’t give them overly-long names. UX integration tests, above the level of the control library itself, aren’t usually concerned with being fuzz tests on what happens when you have a whole bunch of something (long strings, many items) loaded into a control. Normally the control library itself takes care of that for you (and has its own trustworthy fuzzing/property-testing suite), so you only worry about ensuring that your view controller gets the data into the control’s data binding in the right way. I would guess that this bug is there because the view controller is summing up the lengths of the strings under a given section for some task; and then, later on, accidentally using that sum-of-lengths as the determinant for whether each string is too long to fit into its column and needs ellipsis...ing (eliding? elision?), rather than using each individual key’s length. Totally plausible bug, it makes total sense that this is an old bug that nobody discovered until now. It would seem that literally nobody has tried to do this until now. Still, this is the type of thing that’ll get fixed immediately if you file a Radar on it. Whatever the underlying problem is, it’s on the view-controller layer, and definitely a simple fix; and there’s no decisions or opinion required on what the fix should be; and it doesn’t require any specific expertise (like having knowledge of the kernel.) It’s an “easy win” ticket someone would likely knock out the same day you submitted it. The fact that it didn’t get caught during any of the numerous betas since Sierra, really, really implies that nobody ever thought to try this—users or developers. (Because if someone did report this bug in the beta, and it was still in the prod release, you can bet they would have blogged about it when that happened.)
- throwayEngineer 7y ago
  That's nice, but most companies can't brush off user complaints. I found a simple mouse acceleration problem on Ubuntu Desktop had me installing Windows. Apple is an exception, which is why it's so fascinating to study. Why can Apple get away with bugs and overly expensive products? I'm 50/50 on this. I think the primary reason is marketing/psychology tricks to make Apple users feel happy. Or Apple has created an ecosystem that is impossible to leave. I'm just glad I never fell for it.
wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
Tangent (or OT), something I've been struggling with as a new macOS user, how do I get keyboard repeats working? I understand they removed repeats so that a long press can offer accent characters. I've done `defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 5` or something like that and it kinda works but somehow doesn't feel "right" still. Am I missing something obvious?
- hollerith 7y ago
  I haven't experienced your problem on my Mac, but you might try adjusting InitialKeyRepeat, too. I believe the old default was 15 (225 ms). (The old default for KeyRepeat was 2 (30 ms).)
  - wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
    Wow significantly better, I was at 30/5. I had tried lower settings (I think 10/1) at some point and logging in again was hilariously difficult so I stopped messing with it out of fear. 15/2 is beauty. Thanks a lot!
wlesieutre 7y ago
My complaint about this preferene pane - no wildcards in menu names. macOS has a handy "Batch rename" feature in the contextual menu when you right click on files. The renaming GUI gives you options for sequential numbers, text replacement, prefixes, suffixes, inserting dates. But the menu to open this is called "Rename X Items…" so you can't assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Might be 5 items, might be 2914 items. Without wildcards you'd have to make a different shortcut for every different quantity.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  I agree with your criticism, but what I've done to mitigate this issue is bind a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript that walks through Finder's Edit menu and looks for an item beginning with "Rename"
- kccqzy 7y ago
  You can make an actual Automator service to do the batch renaming and then call it whatever you want. The Automator version also has more features than the Finder one.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    This, but I think the more general point here would be that the system preferences panel is for dead simple stuff, and Apple does provide more powerful tools (namely, Automator and Applescript) if you need them. I love Applescript. My entire home entertainment setup basically runs on Applescript—each button on my Harmony remote triggers a different script. There's no equivalent on Windows—you can use Autohotkey, kind of, but without any sort of Apple Event-esque specification it isn't nearly as useful/nice.
vectorEQ 7y ago
lol: "The bug has occurred because of a simple programming error using what I believe Apple refers to as an Outline View. The error is that the first column width, containing the command names, has been set too narrow, and isn’t adjustable by the user either. In coding terms, it’s a trivially simple error which should take a few seconds to fix." that makes no sense at all looking at the behaviour described. if you want to write an article complaining about someones business processes letting through unacceptable bugs, make sure you understand what is a computer. then perhaps learn to debug issues on it. once you can do that, perhaps you will be less tempted to write such a mess.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  You began this post with with a sentence fragment and a massive quote from the article everyone just read wherein no particular point required a reference. You used "lol" in written communication which makes you sound like a 12 year old girl texting her friends. You then continued in mid stream and concluded a sentence that you never began. You said "make sure you understand what is a computer" which makes zero sense whatsoever and joined several sentence fragments with periods. Perhaps before critiquing someone else's communications it would be optimal if you were to improve your own. Your entire communiqe could have been written like do. "The author does not appear to understand how the software he is using actually works, perhaps he ought to clarify his understanding before writing so unclearly about it."
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    > Your entire communiqe could have been written like do. It's not clear what was gained by your point-by-point rebuttal (of presentation rather than content), but it was worth it for this unproofread line.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      That is funny and ironic.
jacobsenscott 7y ago
I doubt it is developer apathy. It smells like a management issue. iOS is where the money is. I don't know anyone at apple, but here's how I imagine it is there: Every OSX engineer probably has more bugs on their plate than can be fixed in one career, in addition to feature development tasks. The OSX team is severely understaffed both because it is not a priority at Apple, and because it is getting harder and harder to find engineers that are able to/willing to work on this kind of code - a Byzantine labyrinth of C flavors that's been accreting lines for decades. The OSX team is in a desperate fight for recognition and status against the iOS team. They believe (and are probably right) that the only way to gain executive mind share there is to build out new visible features, no matter how useless. Witness dark theme, stacks, dynamic desktop, siri on the desktop, a steady stream of useless iPhone integrations, etc. All the troops are ordered to march relentlessly toward feature development. Stability and bug fixes be damned. It bet it takes at least three weeks of focused effort and red tape macheteing to fix this bug and it is way down on someone's list. Even if you fix it the change won't make the next OSX key note at the annual IOScon or whatever it is called, so it won't help your career one iota. Again - this is just how I imagine it is there. I don't really know.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Is there some credible source as to what percentage of revenue or profit MacOS drives versus the rest of the org?
  - jacobsenscott 7y ago
    I'm sure there are lots. This shows iphone dwarfs all other sources of revenue https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q4-18-Data-Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q4-18-Data-Summary.pdf Apple is a phone manufacturer. Computers are a side business.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      A side business that is still a requirement for anyone to ship software into Apple’s iPhone ecosystem, so there’s at least some incentive for Apple to continue supporting it. But given that developers have no choice in the matter, they’re stuck putting up with whatever issues Apple doesn’t bother to fix. I’m sure Apple is well aware of that when prioritizing what bugs are important.
peterwwillis 7y ago
> I cannot believe that they didn’t open this pane and test it, even briefly Does this author really think that every developer, after every code commit, and before every release, manually goes through every single piece of functionality in an entire operating system, in every possible configuration, to ensure nothing regressed? That just does not happen. Either they write regression tests, or they document a feature and have QC evaluate it. But both of those can be error-prone, bugs happen, and there is absolutely no indication that anyone knew about the bugs. Refusing to report them because "they should have known about them anyway" is childish.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  Agree; it's also not rendering the feature "unusable" or "killed" as hyperbolized in the article. It's a bug -- it's a very annoying bug -- but it's pretty middle of the road and doesn't actually prevent the user from doing anything.
rsync 7y ago
"macOS is designed to be rich in features and highly adaptable to everyone’s taste. It’s also designed to be driven in a variety of ways, including extensive use of keyboard shortcuts." Both of these statements are false.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  How so?
btown 7y ago
BetterTouchTool - https://folivora.ai/ https://folivora.ai/ - patches over many of these "rough edges" in macOS, including the arbitrary-keyboard-shortcuts-for-menu-items requirement of the OP. I think it's generally true that while the polished-ness of Apple's own software has deteriorated somewhat, the ecosystem of utilities largely fills that gap... except where it comes to hardware, where the butterfly keyboard problems infuriate me daily to no end.
jxdxbx 7y ago
Why does he assume that the responsible engineers are aware of the bug?
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  His comments are full of people unable to reproduce it, yet he assumes people working on the OS are actively aware of and ignoring it intentionally.
flywithdolp 7y ago
please fix the keyboard bug that make it hot like lava.... can't even touch my mac without gloves
gcb0 7y ago
Lol. Even when that dialog worked as intended, it was total crap! It mostly worked for certain menu items only. Fun game: try to remap Ctrl+a to select all, Ctrl+c to copy etc to mimic unix/windows. (or god forbid, to make your limited mobility device that cost thousands of dollars several years ago to work on your work provided macbook pro) Every single app will behave differently and you will see how broken usability/accessibility is on OSX. Some examples for Ctrl+c: on Firefox, Ctrl+c will move the cursor to the end of the text area while cmd+c will still work as copy, despite the menu hint showing Ctrl+c next to edit>copy. On Notes.app it will work fine and cmd+c stops working (correctly). On safari, calendar and most apple office stuff ctrl+c just do absolutely nothing. In some apps it shows ctrl+c next to edit>copy though, because why not
- simongr3dal 7y ago
  I'm not saying it is easy or logical, but it is possible. System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... In this dialogue you can remap what the modifier keys means, so you can make the ctrl-button act as cmd and make the cmd-button act as ctrl. Personally i use it to make the caps-lock key act as escape.
  - ggg2 7y ago
    now you have the problem of making your crap accessibility hardware closed source firmware to send the caps lock key code instead of ctrl. Good luck with that.
    - fnky 7y ago
      You can change modifiers for different inputs. If you have another keyboard attached, it will give you the option to choose between that, and other keyboards, such as the built-in. They can have different modifier overrides.
Jyaif 7y ago
Related: ⌘-C randomly not working is one of my top issue with the new macOSes. It used to work perfectly fine a couple years ago.
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Very recently a Chrome keyboard shortcut stopped working. It was a bug and they fixed it. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=892480 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=892480 Bugs happen, it doesn't necessarily indicate anything systemic.
- bla3 7y ago
  That bug was fixed in 14 days if I read that page right. The complaint here isn't just that the bug happened, but that it happened long ago, is fairly visible, and is still around a year later.
  - ampersandy 7y ago
    Because they actually bothered to file a bug report. The author thinks what's obvious to them must be obvious to everyone so didn't file anything. Of course it isn't going to be fixed in a timely fashion.
    - bla3 7y ago
      I have filed a few rdars. It's not a good investment of time in my experience.
talkingtab 7y ago
"I can feel it Dave", except that it seems that Apple can't feel it. MacOS is like HAL oe one of those robots that you see in movies that wanders around doing things that no longer make sense. This appears true for hardware as well - I used to long for the latest MacBook and now I am relieved that my 2012 is hanging in there because I don't want to spend all that money for a bad keyboard. Think about that for a minute - 2012 vs 2019! Apple should open source their OS. They would not longer have to waste their time and energy pretending that the MacBook market matters to them. Developers would be happy with them - its a win win situation!!
JadeNB 7y ago
What's with the author's apparent pride in not reporting this to Apple? Even if you feel that developers shouldn't need users to report bugs—which seems like a weird assumption—refusing to report the bugs that affect you hurts you, not the developer. (This is not to defend Apple's responses to Radar reports; I think probably anyone here has one or two sore spots of years-ignored bug reports. But at least they're there!)
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> What is more, as far as I can see, this bug has existed since macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, almost a year ago, in March 2018, if not before. Hmm, I still have my main machine on High Sierra due to nVidia drivers (and Mojave's Apple Event Sandboxing being a giant PITA), and I can't replicate this on 10.13.6. The bug worked on my Mojave machine, however. I wonder if the author is mistaken regarding how long the bug has been present. Or maybe it was introduced in 10.13.4, got fixed, and then was broken again?
ilikehurdles 7y ago
> Right now, if I open my list, it displays like yours, without any ellipses. If I add and then remove a shortcut, half of the list spontaneously turns to “…”. But if I close and open System Preferences again, I’m back where I started, with a properly displaying list By the author's own admission (in the comments) this doesn't even seem like a major bug. His refusal to report it isn't helping anyone, and it's a display issue that's fixed by closing and re-opening a window. How was any keyboard shortcut actually killed here? What a terrible clickbaity headline.
passivepinetree 7y ago
> In coding terms, it’s a trivially simple error which should take a few seconds to fix. This is both a large assumption and a huge oversimplification. What about time to regression test, QA, deploy through the various inner rings/dogfooding groups, check accessibility, etc.? It smacks of a writer who possibly has coded before as a hobbyist but never professionally.

114 points by bkudria 7y ago

tomcam 7y ago

Apple used to be pretty good with Mac accessibility. Now, not so much.

jbverschoor 7y ago
And overall power usage. I think I probably know more shortcuts and optimizations on macOS than most people at Apple.
- arthurcolle 7y ago
  Have any tricks you want to share? My MBP 15" gets 2 hr tops unless its plugged in. Even with "mere" web browsing
  - jerf 7y ago
    Power usage, as in power user, as in "skilled user of software".
    - arthurcolle 7y ago
      Yikes I'm an idiot
  - gumby 7y ago
    That’s a battery problem if so and I’d get it fixed. A new MBP should get something like 10 hours of browsing (presumably Apple claims more)
  - robenkleene 7y ago
    Click the battery indicator in your menu bar and see which apps are listed as "using significant energy"? Go one level deeper and open "Activity Monitor" and look at the energy impact for the apps you are using. Unless you use Safari, which is wonderfully energy-effecient, then the most likely culprit is your web browser, especially if you're using Google Chrome. Personally, I'd use Safari over Chrome for the energy efficiency alone, but I understand people have different priorities. You can also check the health of your battery by doing "Apple Menu" -> "About This Mac" -> "System Report…" and then selecting "Power" in the side bar. (Google for the expected charge capacity for your laptop model.)
  - jbverschoor 7y ago
    Haha. yeah not sureif that was me or a typo + autocorrect Try clicking the battery icon ;-)

js2 7y ago

This bug is much more subtle that the author describes. I use keyboard shortcuts semi-regularly so I would've noticed this bug, especially if it had been around since 10.13. I never noticed it, but then I realized the author's screenshots are all dark themed. I use the light theme and cannot reproduce it under 10.14.4 with light theme. If I toggle to dark theme, I can reproduce it, but not in a consistent way. Depending upon how I add and remove shortcuts and toggle themes, I can get just the last shortcut to display incorrectly, or all of them to display incorrectly, or none of them to. It's some odd interaction between dark/light themes and this panel.

smnscu 7y ago
I mean, they also had this bug for ages: > There is, still, a long-standing MacOS bug where your balance may drift when volume buttons are pressed while CPU is under heavy load. https://github.com/jamsinclair/ballast https://github.com/jamsinclair/ballast https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/ https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/
- on_and_off 7y ago
  ohhh ! that's what happened ! I had this happen to me a couple of month ago. I thought that my headphones were busted until I realized that OsX had decided to mess with the balance for no reason.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

jmull 7y ago

I tried this and for me, it's a minor bug. Upon adding the third shortcut, the display of the "menu" name, indeed, shows as an ellipsis. But: (1) the name is still visible through a tool tip (2) when I close the window and reopen, thingS display fine. (If I start editing again, I can get some weird ellipsis display again, though now by deleting items rather than add thing them) Anyway, definitely a bug, but at least for me it's pretty easy to work around, so a pretty minor bug in a minor feature.

freditup 7y ago

It's a bug for sure, but conclusions like this are over the top for a single small bug: > This isn’t an Apple which has any concern over the quality of its products, or for its users. It’s just another leviathan corporation which has stopped caring or taking pride. One small bug reveals a deep and pervasive problem. I'd rather see a more measured approach to drawing conclusions from a single anecdote.

duxup 7y ago
Yeah the "Apple doesn't care about users" line of thinking for one use case or bug here or there is a bit much. Personally I've introduced bad ... choices because I cared about users a few times. It just was a mistake on my part, and yet the whole time I was thinking "this will be better for the user".
- slantyyz 7y ago
  >> Yeah the "Apple doesn't care about users" line of thinking for one use case or bug here or there is a bit much. To be fair, a lot of people choose OSX over other OSes because Apple has the reputation of "sweating the details" in both their software and their hardware. Some of those people in particular are now noticing that the attention to detail may not be like it was, so it is unsurprising that some are complaining over seemingly little things even when the product as a whole might still be better than its competitors.
protomyth 7y ago
If this was the only item, I would agree with you, but it isn't. Finder is buggy and broken since Mavericks (along with some bugs that look like the got rebroke in [edit]10.14[/edit]). Each new version of Mac OS breaks more stuff. This is exacerbated by their hardware failures and constant "only affects a small number of users" line that gets old. Its a constant stream of breaks these days and they need to start looking at the details.
- rectang 7y ago
  My 2012 MacBook Pro Retina has been more stable on Mojave than on any previous OS. It used to crash at least once a week; at the moment `uptime` tells me it's been 21 days since a reboot. I attribute this to improvements in the reliability of Airplay: my machine used to be prone to crashing after connecting via Airplay (either sound only or mirroring) to my old Apple TV. I'm sure other things have been broken along the way, but it seems to me like Apple is tackling hard problems at the OS level and making progress.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Wow. Looks like I never ran into this bug because I have one too few App Shortcuts set up (only two custom ones, as opposed to 3+). And this has been in place since Sierra?! Wow! I'm not convinced that Apple actually knows about this bug, but what does that say about their software testing...

frou_dh 7y ago

Bug aside, this from-the-outside-in way of creating keyboard shortcuts is a cool feature, that I bet a minority of even Mac powerusers are aware of. See also "DefaultKeyBinding.dict" for more keyboard behavior possibilities, including stuff like ^W and ^U working in Cocoa text fields.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
One great thing about macOS is that Apple provides a couple of tools to extend existing apps. The other really great one is Automator Services/Quick Actions.

derefr 7y ago

> This isn’t a subtle bug which only occurs in certain circumstances. Sure it is. OP is an outlier in how they use this panel. Most people just use it to enable/disable the built-in menu commands, or to modify their accelerators. One very common use-case for people who speak multiple languages is enabling the keyboard switcher accelerator. I expect that they have extensive tests for common use-cases like that. On the other hand, I expect that the test suite they use probably only tests creating one or two custom keyboard shortcuts using the panel; and doesn’t give them overly-long names. UX integration tests, above the level of the control library itself, aren’t usually concerned with being fuzz tests on what happens when you have a whole bunch of something (long strings, many items) loaded into a control. Normally the control library itself takes care of that for you (and has its own trustworthy fuzzing/property-testing suite), so you only worry about ensuring that your view controller gets the data into the control’s data binding in the right way. I would guess that this bug is there because the view controller is summing up the lengths of the strings under a given section for some task; and then, later on, accidentally using that sum-of-lengths as the determinant for whether each string is too long to fit into its column and needs ellipsis...ing (eliding? elision?), rather than using each individual key’s length. Totally plausible bug, it makes total sense that this is an old bug that nobody discovered until now. It would seem that literally nobody has tried to do this until now. Still, this is the type of thing that’ll get fixed immediately if you file a Radar on it. Whatever the underlying problem is, it’s on the view-controller layer, and definitely a simple fix; and there’s no decisions or opinion required on what the fix should be; and it doesn’t require any specific expertise (like having knowledge of the kernel.) It’s an “easy win” ticket someone would likely knock out the same day you submitted it. The fact that it didn’t get caught during any of the numerous betas since Sierra, really, really implies that nobody ever thought to try this—users or developers. (Because if someone did report this bug in the beta, and it was still in the prod release, you can bet they would have blogged about it when that happened.)

throwayEngineer 7y ago
That's nice, but most companies can't brush off user complaints. I found a simple mouse acceleration problem on Ubuntu Desktop had me installing Windows. Apple is an exception, which is why it's so fascinating to study. Why can Apple get away with bugs and overly expensive products? I'm 50/50 on this. I think the primary reason is marketing/psychology tricks to make Apple users feel happy. Or Apple has created an ecosystem that is impossible to leave. I'm just glad I never fell for it.

wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago

Tangent (or OT), something I've been struggling with as a new macOS user, how do I get keyboard repeats working? I understand they removed repeats so that a long press can offer accent characters. I've done `defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 5` or something like that and it kinda works but somehow doesn't feel "right" still. Am I missing something obvious?

hollerith 7y ago
I haven't experienced your problem on my Mac, but you might try adjusting InitialKeyRepeat, too. I believe the old default was 15 (225 ms). (The old default for KeyRepeat was 2 (30 ms).)
- wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
  Wow significantly better, I was at 30/5. I had tried lower settings (I think 10/1) at some point and logging in again was hilariously difficult so I stopped messing with it out of fear. 15/2 is beauty. Thanks a lot!

wlesieutre 7y ago

My complaint about this preferene pane - no wildcards in menu names. macOS has a handy "Batch rename" feature in the contextual menu when you right click on files. The renaming GUI gives you options for sequential numbers, text replacement, prefixes, suffixes, inserting dates. But the menu to open this is called "Rename X Items…" so you can't assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Might be 5 items, might be 2914 items. Without wildcards you'd have to make a different shortcut for every different quantity.

bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
I agree with your criticism, but what I've done to mitigate this issue is bind a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript that walks through Finder's Edit menu and looks for an item beginning with "Rename"
kccqzy 7y ago
You can make an actual Automator service to do the batch renaming and then call it whatever you want. The Automator version also has more features than the Finder one.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  This, but I think the more general point here would be that the system preferences panel is for dead simple stuff, and Apple does provide more powerful tools (namely, Automator and Applescript) if you need them. I love Applescript. My entire home entertainment setup basically runs on Applescript—each button on my Harmony remote triggers a different script. There's no equivalent on Windows—you can use Autohotkey, kind of, but without any sort of Apple Event-esque specification it isn't nearly as useful/nice.

vectorEQ 7y ago

lol: "The bug has occurred because of a simple programming error using what I believe Apple refers to as an Outline View. The error is that the first column width, containing the command names, has been set too narrow, and isn’t adjustable by the user either. In coding terms, it’s a trivially simple error which should take a few seconds to fix." that makes no sense at all looking at the behaviour described. if you want to write an article complaining about someones business processes letting through unacceptable bugs, make sure you understand what is a computer. then perhaps learn to debug issues on it. once you can do that, perhaps you will be less tempted to write such a mess.

michaelmrose 7y ago
You began this post with with a sentence fragment and a massive quote from the article everyone just read wherein no particular point required a reference. You used "lol" in written communication which makes you sound like a 12 year old girl texting her friends. You then continued in mid stream and concluded a sentence that you never began. You said "make sure you understand what is a computer" which makes zero sense whatsoever and joined several sentence fragments with periods. Perhaps before critiquing someone else's communications it would be optimal if you were to improve your own. Your entire communiqe could have been written like do. "The author does not appear to understand how the software he is using actually works, perhaps he ought to clarify his understanding before writing so unclearly about it."
- JadeNB 7y ago
  > Your entire communiqe could have been written like do. It's not clear what was gained by your point-by-point rebuttal (of presentation rather than content), but it was worth it for this unproofread line.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    That is funny and ironic.

jacobsenscott 7y ago

I doubt it is developer apathy. It smells like a management issue. iOS is where the money is. I don't know anyone at apple, but here's how I imagine it is there: Every OSX engineer probably has more bugs on their plate than can be fixed in one career, in addition to feature development tasks. The OSX team is severely understaffed both because it is not a priority at Apple, and because it is getting harder and harder to find engineers that are able to/willing to work on this kind of code - a Byzantine labyrinth of C flavors that's been accreting lines for decades. The OSX team is in a desperate fight for recognition and status against the iOS team. They believe (and are probably right) that the only way to gain executive mind share there is to build out new visible features, no matter how useless. Witness dark theme, stacks, dynamic desktop, siri on the desktop, a steady stream of useless iPhone integrations, etc. All the troops are ordered to march relentlessly toward feature development. Stability and bug fixes be damned. It bet it takes at least three weeks of focused effort and red tape macheteing to fix this bug and it is way down on someone's list. Even if you fix it the change won't make the next OSX key note at the annual IOScon or whatever it is called, so it won't help your career one iota. Again - this is just how I imagine it is there. I don't really know.

tyingq 7y ago
Is there some credible source as to what percentage of revenue or profit MacOS drives versus the rest of the org?
- jacobsenscott 7y ago
  I'm sure there are lots. This shows iphone dwarfs all other sources of revenue https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q4-18-Data-Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q4-18-Data-Summary.pdf Apple is a phone manufacturer. Computers are a side business.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    A side business that is still a requirement for anyone to ship software into Apple’s iPhone ecosystem, so there’s at least some incentive for Apple to continue supporting it. But given that developers have no choice in the matter, they’re stuck putting up with whatever issues Apple doesn’t bother to fix. I’m sure Apple is well aware of that when prioritizing what bugs are important.

peterwwillis 7y ago

> I cannot believe that they didn’t open this pane and test it, even briefly Does this author really think that every developer, after every code commit, and before every release, manually goes through every single piece of functionality in an entire operating system, in every possible configuration, to ensure nothing regressed? That just does not happen. Either they write regression tests, or they document a feature and have QC evaluate it. But both of those can be error-prone, bugs happen, and there is absolutely no indication that anyone knew about the bugs. Refusing to report them because "they should have known about them anyway" is childish.

wool_gather 7y ago
Agree; it's also not rendering the feature "unusable" or "killed" as hyperbolized in the article. It's a bug -- it's a very annoying bug -- but it's pretty middle of the road and doesn't actually prevent the user from doing anything.

rsync 7y ago

"macOS is designed to be rich in features and highly adaptable to everyone’s taste. It’s also designed to be driven in a variety of ways, including extensive use of keyboard shortcuts." Both of these statements are false.

saagarjha 7y ago
How so?

btown 7y ago

BetterTouchTool - https://folivora.ai/ https://folivora.ai/ - patches over many of these "rough edges" in macOS, including the arbitrary-keyboard-shortcuts-for-menu-items requirement of the OP. I think it's generally true that while the polished-ness of Apple's own software has deteriorated somewhat, the ecosystem of utilities largely fills that gap... except where it comes to hardware, where the butterfly keyboard problems infuriate me daily to no end.

jxdxbx 7y ago

Why does he assume that the responsible engineers are aware of the bug?

ilikehurdles 7y ago
His comments are full of people unable to reproduce it, yet he assumes people working on the OS are actively aware of and ignoring it intentionally.

flywithdolp 7y ago

please fix the keyboard bug that make it hot like lava.... can't even touch my mac without gloves

gcb0 7y ago

Lol. Even when that dialog worked as intended, it was total crap! It mostly worked for certain menu items only. Fun game: try to remap Ctrl+a to select all, Ctrl+c to copy etc to mimic unix/windows. (or god forbid, to make your limited mobility device that cost thousands of dollars several years ago to work on your work provided macbook pro) Every single app will behave differently and you will see how broken usability/accessibility is on OSX. Some examples for Ctrl+c: on Firefox, Ctrl+c will move the cursor to the end of the text area while cmd+c will still work as copy, despite the menu hint showing Ctrl+c next to edit>copy. On Notes.app it will work fine and cmd+c stops working (correctly). On safari, calendar and most apple office stuff ctrl+c just do absolutely nothing. In some apps it shows ctrl+c next to edit>copy though, because why not

simongr3dal 7y ago
I'm not saying it is easy or logical, but it is possible. System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... In this dialogue you can remap what the modifier keys means, so you can make the ctrl-button act as cmd and make the cmd-button act as ctrl. Personally i use it to make the caps-lock key act as escape.
- ggg2 7y ago
  now you have the problem of making your crap accessibility hardware closed source firmware to send the caps lock key code instead of ctrl. Good luck with that.
  - fnky 7y ago
    You can change modifiers for different inputs. If you have another keyboard attached, it will give you the option to choose between that, and other keyboards, such as the built-in. They can have different modifier overrides.

Jyaif 7y ago

Related: ⌘-C randomly not working is one of my top issue with the new macOSes. It used to work perfectly fine a couple years ago.

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

Very recently a Chrome keyboard shortcut stopped working. It was a bug and they fixed it. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=892480 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=892480 Bugs happen, it doesn't necessarily indicate anything systemic.

bla3 7y ago
That bug was fixed in 14 days if I read that page right. The complaint here isn't just that the bug happened, but that it happened long ago, is fairly visible, and is still around a year later.
- ampersandy 7y ago
  Because they actually bothered to file a bug report. The author thinks what's obvious to them must be obvious to everyone so didn't file anything. Of course it isn't going to be fixed in a timely fashion.
  - bla3 7y ago
    I have filed a few rdars. It's not a good investment of time in my experience.

talkingtab 7y ago

"I can feel it Dave", except that it seems that Apple can't feel it. MacOS is like HAL oe one of those robots that you see in movies that wanders around doing things that no longer make sense. This appears true for hardware as well - I used to long for the latest MacBook and now I am relieved that my 2012 is hanging in there because I don't want to spend all that money for a bad keyboard. Think about that for a minute - 2012 vs 2019! Apple should open source their OS. They would not longer have to waste their time and energy pretending that the MacBook market matters to them. Developers would be happy with them - its a win win situation!!

JadeNB 7y ago

What's with the author's apparent pride in not reporting this to Apple? Even if you feel that developers shouldn't need users to report bugs—which seems like a weird assumption—refusing to report the bugs that affect you hurts you, not the developer. (This is not to defend Apple's responses to Radar reports; I think probably anyone here has one or two sore spots of years-ignored bug reports. But at least they're there!)

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> What is more, as far as I can see, this bug has existed since macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, almost a year ago, in March 2018, if not before. Hmm, I still have my main machine on High Sierra due to nVidia drivers (and Mojave's Apple Event Sandboxing being a giant PITA), and I can't replicate this on 10.13.6. The bug worked on my Mojave machine, however. I wonder if the author is mistaken regarding how long the bug has been present. Or maybe it was introduced in 10.13.4, got fixed, and then was broken again?

ilikehurdles 7y ago

> Right now, if I open my list, it displays like yours, without any ellipses. If I add and then remove a shortcut, half of the list spontaneously turns to “…”. But if I close and open System Preferences again, I’m back where I started, with a properly displaying list By the author's own admission (in the comments) this doesn't even seem like a major bug. His refusal to report it isn't helping anyone, and it's a display issue that's fixed by closing and re-opening a window. How was any keyboard shortcut actually killed here? What a terrible clickbaity headline.

passivepinetree 7y ago

> In coding terms, it’s a trivially simple error which should take a few seconds to fix. This is both a large assumption and a huge oversimplification. What about time to regression test, QA, deploy through the various inner rings/dogfooding groups, check accessibility, etc.? It smacks of a writer who possibly has coded before as a hobbyist but never professionally.