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That's one thing that baffles me about MacOS. There is a lot of powerful stuff hidden behind keyboard shortcuts but there is almost no way to find them. It seem
by Ididntdothis 7y ago
That's one thing that baffles me about MacOS. There is a lot of powerful stuff hidden behind keyboard shortcuts but there is almost no way to find them. It seems a colossal waste of energy to first implement them but then making it very hard to find them.
On iPadOS it's very similar. Sometimes I get two apps on the screen by accident but I have no idea how I did it and there is no way to find out how to do it if you don't do an online search. Good old drop down menus were actually good for something.
- madeofpalk 7y agoIs that a macOS thing, or just a conceptual problem with keyboard shortcuts? IMHO macOS does a pretty decent job of discoverability for shortcuts as they’ll be listed there in the menu. edit: originally I doubted whether Windows does this or not. It does! Somehow I missed this despite using Windows every day...
- noisem4ker 7y agoWindows programs absolutely do show shortcut keys in their menus. http://homepage.eircom.net/~pcengineers/kbguide.html http://homepage.eircom.net/~pcengineers/kbguide.html This is in addition to access keys (also explained in the document above), underlined letters you can type to instantly navigate the menus and select even the items for which no shortcut is defined.
- madeofpalk 7y agoMy bad.
- DanBC 7y agoHere's what I get on Windows 10 in Firefox, showing both the shortcuts and the menu keys. https://imgur.com/a/EUEr8y5 https://imgur.com/a/EUEr8y5
- deergomoo 7y agoWhile it doesn’t solve the issue of not knowing a feature is there in the first place, if there’s something you’d like to do in an app, you can get a long way by hitting “Help” in the menu bar and typing it into the search field. If there are any matches for it you’ll immediately know you can do it, and it will open up the menu and show you exactly where it is (and the keyboard shortcut, if there is one). This is the primary way I look for power-user or other non-obvious features in new Mac apps.
- barrkel 7y agoMenus are still superior to help search for feature discovery because they are an explicit navigable enumeration of the feature set surface; if help doesn't have the right synonyms, you'll be stuck, whereas menu item listing might hint at different ways to accomplish the same end goal.
- snowwrestler 7y agoMac menus list the keyboard shortcuts for menu items right next to the items.
- barrkel 7y agoSo do menus on all desktop platforms I've used. My point is that menus work as a way of exposing functionality and making it discoverable through enumeration in a way that contextual UIs and fashionable techniques of the day don't.
- int_19h 7y agoI'm pretty sure that visible shortcuts are a CUA thing. They date way back - even text-mode menu-driven DOS apps had them, e.g. all the Borland IDEs.
- wlesieutre 7y agoFYI the search box in the help menu searches the rest of the menu bar. It's great for feature discovery if you think something might exist but don't know where it is.