11–20 of 29 posts
That sounds like 44% of users have triggered a keyboard shortcut by mistake.
forget coherent, i want consistent. using a mac for work and a windows machine for personal use messes with me. add in editors having inconsistent emacs keybindings, and some macos apps respecting some subset of emacs keybindings while others don't...and then a kinesis advantage to make some of the solutions non-viable
Even on Windows alone some shortcuts are terribly inconsistent. Redo (Ctrl-Y or Ctrl-Shift-Z) Replace (Ctrl-H, Ctrl-R or Ctrl-Shift-F) Save As (F12 or Ctrl-Alt-S) "Move current paragraph up" is inconsistent even between Microsoft's own programs: Alt-Shift-Up in Word, Alt-Up in VS Code and Visual Studio. Notepad++ adds to the pain with Ctrl-Shift-Up. Ctrl-F doesn't open a Find dialog box in Outlook, I could go on.
But web apps might not like potentially giving up so much control over their interface/UX and I think the system would need to be so complicated (eg look at Emacs with nested keymaps, remapping, multiple active keymaps, transient keymaps, and even the weird translation maps) that it would be often overkill and frequently incomprehensible and practically unconfigurable.
But the status quo where web apps often have fixed keyboard shortcuts, override browser/os defaults to do totally unrelated operations, and offer little recourse also doesn’t seem great. All I really want is for Google docs on Linux to give me Emacs (or at least macOS) style shortcuts for moving in text.
Applications are in far worse shape, overall. Most applications don't support shortcut customization! Not even browsers. A remarkable oversight, IMHO. But most apps don't support shortcut customization, forcing you to learn their shortcuts, which is user-hostile no matter how well they are designed, IMHO.
User-modifiable shortcuts plus a user willing to modify them are the key to happiness. It lets you iterate until you are satisfied. The macOS has better built-in tools for this; for Windows you need to install PowerToys. But that's just for the OS level adjustments. Applications are in far worse shape, overall. Most applications don't support shortcut customization! Not even browsers. A remarkable oversight, IMHO. Bu…
Similarly, the OS could provide a facility to define custom toolbars based on available actions, that could automatically be attached to the respective application windows. Basically, an OS-managed version of the toolbars that used to be ubiquitous in Windows applications.
User-modifiable shortcuts plus a user willing to modify them are the key to happiness. It lets you iterate until you are satisfied. The macOS has better built-in tools for this; for Windows you need to install PowerToys. But that's just for the OS level adjustments. Applications are in far worse shape, overall. Most applications don't support shortcut customization! Not even browsers. A remarkable oversight, IMHO. Bu…
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...
sadly this is limited to menu actions only but it's at least something.
User-modifiable shortcuts plus a user willing to modify them are the key to happiness. It lets you iterate until you are satisfied. The macOS has better built-in tools for this; for Windows you need to install PowerToys. But that's just for the OS level adjustments. Applications are in far worse shape, overall. Most applications don't support shortcut customization! Not even browsers. A remarkable oversight, IMHO. Bu…
It’s a tragedy that OSs haven’t evolved to provide explicit support for that. Imagine that every application would expose a catalog of its internal actions, and that there would be an OS-level configuration facility to define your custom keyboard mappings, and possibly also macros, for the application actions. There’s no reason that every application should need to reinvent the wheel here. You could also export your…
forget coherent, i want consistent. using a mac for work and a windows machine for personal use messes with me. add in editors having inconsistent emacs keybindings, and some macos apps respecting some subset of emacs keybindings while others don't...and then a kinesis advantage to make some of the solutions non-viable
Edit: Which is the big reason why I believe that every program should allow users to customize shortcuts completely and ideally ship with presets that do their best to conform to every standard/convention possible ("do you want to preload CUA, EMACS, or MacOS convention shortcuts?").
forget coherent, i want consistent. using a mac for work and a windows machine for personal use messes with me. add in editors having inconsistent emacs keybindings, and some macos apps respecting some subset of emacs keybindings while others don't...and then a kinesis advantage to make some of the solutions non-viable
One reason I’ve developed such a dependency on mousing and not short cuts. Now it’s just windows and macos but before it was windows, macos, unity, and gnome 3. Using the mouse is sane. 2-4 sets of shortcuts is not.
On the subject of consistent keyboard shortcuts, does anyone here have a copy of the complete Common User Access documents? What I can find online (linked to from Wikipedia below) is incomplete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access Alternatively, I'm also interested in a comprehensive listing of Common User Access keyboard shortcuts. Without the original documents themselves, I'm not sure how comprehe…
I've been searching for the same for years. I even bought a set of one of the revisions of the printed and bound documents IBM produced on an eBay auction one time, only to have the seller cancel the order.
My next step is to start hunting some university library catalogs to see if I can find them that way, but digital would be preferred!