251–260 of 459 posts
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End? What does that mean? Does it quit the current app? Does it shutdown? I’m really confused! And this strange Home key, what’s that for? Going to my start page? Showing the desktop? Start menu? What’s going on?!
It's pretty easy to push a key and find out what it does compared to imagining a key combination and trying to figure if that key combination even does anything
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Well, there are a couple of subtleties that are being addressed, that maybe need to be said better. 1) Mac keyboard shortcuts are confusing and inconsistent compared to other OSes. They're not as discoverable. Maybe this is why it seems like there are more of them or that they're harder to learn. When I say they're confusing, I mean that they use those funky characters instead of the words Ctrl, Alt or Shift. Those c…
Ah yes, OS X keyboard shortcuts sure do have bad discoverability. I'm in Safari, I wonder how to see page source. I click the Help menu (or Cmd-?) and type in 'source'. It finds the 'View Source' menu item. I arrow down to it and not only does it open the menu containing it, but there's a big animated blue arrow pointing at the keyboard shortcut. And what do you know, those funky symbols are in fact printed on my key…
first..you'd have to know to think about what the feature is named...
...on Windows...you can invoke any menu by pressing ALT and then the first letter of the menu or a designated letter on a menu option (or you can use the arrows)...all windows menus get this behavior by default, in addition to separate keyboard shortcuts that can also be defined in the application
...you can get to the menus on Macs through a rather inconvenient combo CTRL-F2 (CTRL-FN-F2 on Macbooks)...but you can only arrow through commands, there are no letter shortcuts in that case.
...I like OS X, but this is one area that Windows does much better (that and multiple monitors)...
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Hold shift while clicking the zoom button to maximize the window. Edit: in Chrome only.
Or install a utility like RightZoom.
I've been using OSX as my main desktop OS for about a year now, and it's unbelievable how many simple customizations require third party products. To make it worse, a lot of them cost money.
Coming from Debian and Fluxbox I'm used to almost any possible configuration or customization being possible via /etc, the files in ~/.fluxbox/, or utilities installed using synaptic.
I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…
What? I don't think you understand how terminals work! The terminal commands (on every terminal I've used for the past 20 years) are interpreted by the server. If your terminal is connected to a unix machine then generally emacs key navigation is the default. This is true for Mac OS X. Meta-F and Meta-B go forward and backward by words. Meta-delete deletes a word. C-a (and the HOME key) will go to the beginning of a line. C-e (and the END key) will go to the end.
That being said there's a couple annoying (for powerusers) defaults in Terminal. I always use the "option is meta" setting so I can type Option-f when I mean M-f. Otherwise I have to type ESC-f which is harder for me. The other is that the naked HOME and END keys are by default bound to scrolling the terminal window and you have to press SHIFT-HOME and SHIFT-END to get Terminal to actually send the HOME and END character sequence through the terminal (same for page-up and page-down which are also stupidly backward). If you come from Linux and are used to using SHIFT-PAGE-UP for look at your scrollback then it can be annoying. But luckily those are easily fixed.
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>> On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source. > Darwin ports? Fink? I've used both for the past near-decade (fink for 4 years, now macports for the past 3), along with a Debian desktop, and they're much worse imo. They do the job sort of, b…
I have been using HomeBrew on Mac OS X and it is miles ahead of where MacPorts and Fink are. Definitely worth a try.
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But very, very few apps ever get it right, and most people seem to just want minimize and maximize.
Have you ever used a 30" display? Maximizing windows does not make a whole lot of sense there, especially considering the difference in window contents on Windows vs Mac (ie. self-contained menubar, etc).
I maintain that people think of multi-windowed UI in terms of windows first. Resizing a window to fit the content makes less sense than resizing the content to fit the window. People also seem to get really upset when UI interaction isn't consistent, and the Mac approach means that it varies wildly between apps.
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i tend not to use it for this very reason. i've wished, on more than one occasion, that a user could customize this action to be a "maximize vertically", as one could in gnome2. maybe i'm one of the few who actually used this, as it seems to have been phased out in gnome3. but i found it very useful.
You're not the only one to use vertical maximization. I really liked being able to middle-click the maximize button for vertical, or right-click for horizontal. It seems that's no longer the case in Gnome-3-hacked-to-look-like-Gnome-2-in-Ubuntu-11.10. I suppose it's replaced by Windows 7-style border dragging, but that's less flexible as you can only do maximize, left half, or right half.
Works on my KDE4 (over Ubuntu) .. only been using KDE since about 98/99 and never knew about this.
This goes up there with double- and triple-click +drag for selection.
I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…
Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't: > In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot. They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it. > When I click the Maximize bu…
What are you talking about? Almost all of your rejoinders are poorly discoverable or require unexpected amounts of effort.
Re: "maximize" button that is being complained about in this thread. It's not a maximize button, it's a zoom button, and while I don't like its behavior, it's always been this way in OS X. From the current HIG: Your application determines the initial size and position of a window, which is called the standard state. If the user changes a window’s size or location by at least 7 points, the new size and location is the…
Who cares about the justification. The major problem with it is that the behaviour is unpredictable. You have no idea what is going to happen when you push that button for a given app. In some apps, they'll go full screen. A browser might resize to fit the current web page. iTunes actually shrinks down to a mini control window. So now in order to use this button if a useful manner the user has to remember exactly wha…
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Um, have you ever actually used a Mac? Like, since 1987 or so? Mac keyboard shortcuts are: 1) Not confusing at all, the common ones date back decades and are largely similar to other platforms. 2) No, they don't use "funky characters". Command is a word. Do you have difficulty recognizing what "Command-S" means for save, or "Command-P" for print, etc? 3) I beg to differ. Command, control and option are on the keyboar…
I tend to agree, but working out how to move a cursor around text, with various combinations of either character by character, or word by word, or to the beginning or end of the line, and either selecting or not selecting text, was pretty frustrating. 3) My keyboard has [fn][ctrl][alt][cmd][space][cmd][alt], there's no [option].
You navigate text using the arrow keys on their own (characters and lines) or with one of two modifiers: Alt (words and paragraphs) and Command (lines and text fields). If you use no modifiers you are moving around one character (left, right) or line (up, down) at a time. Alt allows you to move from word to word (left, right) or paragraph to paragraph (up, down). Command navigates to the beginning and end of the line (left, right) or text field (up, down). As you can see there is a clear and straightforward hierarchy.
People are already used to using the arrow keys to navigate text. The modifier keys do nothing more than what they are supposed to do: The arrow keys still do similar stuff than before, it’s only slightly modified. This is an excellent example of picking awesome keyboard shortcuts.
You can add Shift to any of those combinations to select instead of just moving the cursor. Command-Left moves the cursor the the beginning of the line, Command-Shift-Left selects everything between the current position of the cursor and the beginning of the line.
Shift is used for selecting things everywhere, no matter the OS. OS X definitely picks the right modifier for selecting text and everything is still consistent with moving around in text. Anyone who knows how to move around in text can easily be taught how to select text: It’s exactly the same, only with Shift.
If you use Backspace and Delete (which is Fn-Backspace on keyboards without the Delete key) together with Alt or Command you can delete words or lines respectively (as you would expect).
Again, OS X remains consistent. Backspace and Delete work with exactly the same modifiers in exactly the same way as the arrow keys. This behavior is once again easy to teach.
This all seems crystal clear to me and I’m loving it very much. I think all the key combinations make intuitive sense.
I hope I could also explain why I think that OS X is so consistent and intuitive in this regard.