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On Windows, you could press ALT to navigate the menu bar: each menu item would have a letter underlined to tell you how to select it, and when you picked a lett
by seanwilson 5y ago
On Windows, you could press ALT to navigate the menu bar: each menu item would have a letter underlined to tell you how to select it, and when you picked a letter the menu would expand and each new item would have an underlined item etc. So you quickly discover and commit to muscle memory that ALT + F + S would select File then Save. This worked for dialog pop-up options as well so you didn't have to click.
You can't do this on Mac? Why? I found this really jarring. I know on Mac you can press CTRL + F2 (add Fn key if you have one) to change the keyboard focus to the menus but it doesn't underline the letters that will work and you have to hit enter to open things so it's clunky.
The command palette is nice for discovery of lesser used commands and when there's lots of them but it's less predictable what keys you need to press to fuzzy search to the command you know is there and it doesn't teach your fingers the shortest key combo to trigger it.
- miffy900 5y agoIt is annoying, but CMD+? (help menu search) I think makes up for it. It's far more useful for when you're navigating an unfamiliar interface.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rz2k 5y agoEspecially in Excel, using the keyboard to do everything is vastly superior in Windows. However in MacOS `command-shift-/` (⌘?) immediately shifts focuses to the help menu where you can begin typing to navigate directly to any command that appears in an application's menus, without needing to know where the command is hierarchically organized. It's very fast, and seems to work everywhere. I have Karabiner-Elements configured to register ⌘? whenever I press and release the left control alone without using it as a modifier of any other key. The `to_if_alone` condition in Karabiner-Elements is one of my favorite ways to re-use all of the modifier keys to invoke special commands. It would be great if I could figure out how to do that in Windows.
- alkonaut 5y agoThis was a nightmare to deal with together with i18N. What if there were no available letters for doing something in a language for a particular command? The solution was in the switch to Ribbons: the underlines were replaced with keytips that are displayed when you hit Alt and as such aren’t required to be a character in the command’s name.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]