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Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

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Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#21

Post by pwg »

orthoxerox wrote: post #7
chrsig wrote: post #2

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.

> Ctrl-F doesn't open a Find dialog box in Outlook

For this, in Outlook, the explanation is (per Raymond Chen): Bill Gates

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#22

Post by layer8 »

btrettel wrote: post #9

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…

You can find a copy of ISBN 1565291700 [0] on Libgen, or a used print copy on Amazon or AbeBooks etc. The book contains a table of keyboard shortcuts, although I’m not sure whether it’s complete. It’s probably also possible to order the references listed in [0] from IBM, but I haven’t tried that.

The *.boo files linked under [0] can be read on Windows using the IBM Softcopy reader [1].

[0] http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Common_User_Access

[1] https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-softcopy-reader-window...

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#23

Post by javajosh »

layer8 wrote: post #15
javajosh wrote: post #14

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…

Indeed. Although it seems like AppleScript wanted to do something like that, to get apps to expose their nouns and verbs, which is a really great idea. Perhaps if Apple'd sweetened the deal with "universal shortcuts" more app devs would have bothered to expose this catalog. Who knows! And heaven knows Apple's scraping the bottom of the barrel of innovative OS features, so maybe this will happen at some point...and/or they'll wait for AI-improved OS that can provide the catalogue without dev involvement.

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#24

Post by copperx »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #3
chrsig wrote: post #2

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.

Well ... I switch between Qwerty and Dvorak. 2x the pain! That's one thing that I didn't foresee when learning Dvorak.

To use a shortcut, I need to know :

1) What keyboard layout am I using?

2) Am I using a Kinesis or standard keyboard?

3) What OS am I using?

4) What app I'm using?

Don't do it, kids. Now I'm so invested in Dvorak that I can't go back. It's an irreversible change.

It's suprising, but muscle memory somehow makes all of this work (most of the time). Sometimes I screw up horribly.

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#25

Post by betwixthewires »

I'm so frustrated these days with a lack of keyboard controls in GUI applications. It's like developers just want to limit you to being able to operate their software with one single finger. And most of the time they're bad at UX, so you wind up not having coherent workflows even with a mouse.

I'm a huge fan of vim keybinds. The concept is fantastic, you've got a panel of switches in front of you that you can make do anything, why limit it to being a typewriter? That said, ctrl keys are fine. I can live with it. It works. If that's all I can get, please do it. Any desktop application should have at a bare minimum Ctrl shortcuts for everything.

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#26

Post by qu4z-2 »

layer8 wrote: post #15
javajosh wrote: post #14

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…

I will never not sing the praises of KDE3.5 (although of course stuff like shortcuts and use of KIO mostly only works in apps built on KDE libraries).

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#27

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

Hands down the best implementation of shortcuts I've come across is Blender (the 3d modeller). First it has shortcuts for many actions out of the box and second you can create or modify any keyboard shortcuts on (almost) any operator (button) in the interface by right clicking on the operator and assigning your shortcuts. There is also a fully searchable and customisable key map, you can import and export key maps and you can switch between them easily. Lastly it supports search based navigation.

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#28

Post by actuallyalys »

chrsig wrote: post #2

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

For macOS-Windows consistency, you can try kinto.sh, although the AutoHotkey-based implementation is not always reliable in my experience.

Re: Designing a coherent set of keyboard shortcuts

#29

Post by nicbou »

comfypotato wrote: post #6
chrsig wrote: post #2

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

As a long time Windows user who switched to a Mac at work at one point, I was pleasantly surprised by the extent to which I was able to make the Mac conform to my muscle memory. If I remember correctly, I basically swapped the software mapping command and control. On top of this, I had to finagle with a system shortcut or two. In the end, everything just worked as if it was a Windows machine. Concerning Emacs, I've f…

Keyboard shortcut consistency was one of the first pleasant surprises of switching to MacOS.
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