Contexts.app for a more traditional alt-tab.
Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
61–70 of 153 posts
Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#62In this vein, I've got a Hammerspoon script so I can hit cmd-option-ctrl N, to make a new desktop with a fresh chrome window in it.
Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#63I recently purchased a MacBook, and while I'm thoroughly impressed with the hardware, I find the keyboard navigation in the desktop environment somewhat lacking in comparison to my previous experience. Having used Linux Pop OS for many years, I've grown accustomed to the intuitive and powerful tiling window manager and keyboard navigation shortcuts it offers. I'm struggling to find a comparable solution on the macOS…
I’ll just throw Magnet in the ring for a tiling solution. I have keyboard shortcuts well in muscle memory now for left/right third/half/two-thirds, and all four corners at a quarter of screen, and full screen. I find that meets 90% of my needs. Left/right two-thirds is my go-to when coding on 14”. VSCode on the left, Safari on the right. Both big enough to work well, but both leave enough of the other visible to be u…
I use Magnet, but settings not syncing across devices is a bit annoying.
Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#64I used to have a clipboard manager that gave me access to my last X copied items, as well as a navigable list of snippets. A few years back, a MacOS update broke whatever tool I was using, and I ended up buying BetterTouchTool. BTT does give me my clipboard history, and it appears to be very powerful in general, but I can't figure out an easy way to replicate the navigable list of snippets. I do use the MacOS text ex…
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Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#65This post and thread are terrific, and the day I learned common Emacs bindings work in most corners of macOS was momentous, but…
Whenever advanced keyboard shortcuts are under discussion, I’m reminded of something I read, I think by Bruce Tognazzini, on an early Apple study of keyboard vs. mouse. They had set up the usual usability test—run through these common spreadsheet tasks or whatever—and compared skilled users exclusively on mouse with equally skilled users issuing keyboard commands via shortcut. Maybe they swapped them back and forth on the modes, I don’t recall.
When the experiment was over, the mouse and keyboard users agreed: Shortcuts were faster, switching hands to the mouse and issuing commands via the cursor was slower. But the actual measured results showed no significant difference. Tog speculated that there’s some deep perceptual circuitry that’s tuned to notice the cost of mode-switching but submerge into the subconscious the cost of recall.
EDIT: I'm sure he's referenced it a dozen times in a dozen places, but here's a version of Tog's analysis that's roughly what I remember:
https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#66I recently purchased a MacBook, and while I'm thoroughly impressed with the hardware, I find the keyboard navigation in the desktop environment somewhat lacking in comparison to my previous experience. Having used Linux Pop OS for many years, I've grown accustomed to the intuitive and powerful tiling window manager and keyboard navigation shortcuts it offers. I'm struggling to find a comparable solution on the macOS…
It's a sore-spot for sure. I've found that Rectangle[0] does a good enough job. [0] https://rectangleapp.com/
Rectangle is so good - it's the first thing I recommend anyone new to MacOS download. I don't know why apple hasn't implemented this natively.
Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#67Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the constant emphasis on mouse use, ever since the first Macintosh, has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter"; I've noticed that even early Windows is very usable with only a keyboard (the Alt, underlined letters, and arrow keys method is particularly well-designed), whereas e.g. classic MacOS is basically unusable without a mouse. In later versions they added keyboard access, but it still feels…
> has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter"; I think you would be surprised at just how powerful the keyboard subsystem in osx is and how malleable it is with some programs or even just editing the plist shortcuts. every menu item in any application can be given a per app or universal shortcut in `system preferences | keyboard | shortcuts | app shortcuts` You can also use a thing like hammerspoon to do wha…
I was talking about pre-OSX.
Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#69I was hoping this was about lesser known macOS keyboard shortcuts. Alas. Apple has a pretty exhaustive list of so-called document shortcuts that I find particularly useful: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236#text Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E in particular to jump to the beginning and end of a line are a pair that I use dozens of times per day. Same with Opt+Delete to delete the previous word. I use Opt+Left Arrow and Opt+…
Lots of those shortcuts are basically Emacs shortcuts. I’m always sad using gdocs on Linux that they don’t support the Emacs shortcuts.
Yep. Yank and Kill work too, among others
Re: Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
#70BTT is great man, it just allows you to configure any shortcut for any app. But the one key I use the most is assigning “`” key as the back button. You keep your hand on that key while surfing web or any app that has a back navigation, it’s just so much better than clicking or remembering each apps back shortcut. If you really need to type ` then you assign fn-` it’s really rarely used
FYI, the keyboard shortcut for back is ⌘+[, and forward is ⌘+]. This is system-wide, and works in apps like Safari, Finder, Chrome, System Settings, etc.
CMD + left / right arrow key also works, for everyone without a US layout