interface basics

L

leegte

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Hi all,

There's a few things that annoy me a lot with OSX. Maybe there's a catch, please help me if there is. Also my apologies if these topics have been discussed earlier, I couldn't find them. Please link them to save time if you know them!

My basic frustration is the mouse dependancy of the OS. It seems you can't navigate through the OS just using the keyboard, which is essential I think, because you can work much faster, and get less RSI (Get in menubars, choosing within confirm windows, switching within the finder between frames, etc.)
Many Mac-users have told me tricks within the confirm window: command+D for "don't", esc for "cancel", and enter for "accept". But these don't always work. also sometimes you can use tab to select buttons, after which you can use the space bar to click. But many times you can't.
I really hope Apple will clean up this mess, as is seems such an easy problem. Getting the whole OS keyboard controllable should be target no.1, but that probably is a big, big project...

Other; beautifull OS, great stable software, fantastic hardware. But usability is the basis. And it seems to be set up very inconsequently, something I'd never expected from such a perfectionistic company. Enlighten me!

:)
 
leegte,

Some useful navigation commands:

Turn on keyboard access: crtl-F1
Navigating to the menubar: ctrl-F2
Navigating to the dock: ctrl-F3
Once the focus is in the dock or menubar, navigate with arrow keys and return.

For the confirm window, esc is always cancel and return is always the default (I'm pretty sure anyway). Tab-space works in many apps - when it doesn't, u just have to use the mouse (but is tab space really that much faster?).
 
Many Mac-users have told me tricks within the confirm window: command+D for "don't", esc for "cancel", and enter for "accept". But these don't always work. also sometimes you can use tab to select buttons, after which you can use the space bar to click. But many times you can't.
Click to expand...

The reason for that is the failure of application developers to follow Apple guidelines. You'll find they mostly work though.

I use QuicKeys and have been doing so for nearly 20 years. I have many, many, keyboard shortcuts defined for things I do a lot. I also use it to standardize shortcuts across applications when there's an inconsistency.
 
My personal favorite way to stop using the mouse is to start using Terminal.

/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
 
You should be able to configure a lot of keyboard control options by going to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. If you're using an older OS (10.2 or earlier, I think), you won't have these features, though.
 
Mikuro,

Thanks for the response. I am using 10.4.9. the ^F2 box is selected in the keyboard shortcuts but when I push ^F2, I get the same response as for F2 alone which is to brighten the screen. ^F1 dims the screen, ^F3 mutes the speakers. Oddly enough, ^F8 does do what it is supposed to do, move me to the focus to the status menus.

Any idea what is going on?
 
I just figured out that I can get it to work by going to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard, and checking the box next to "use F1-F12 keys to control software features"

This makes ^F2 navigate me to the menu bar but now I need to use the function key to control the screen and speaker volume. Is this the way it should be?
 
Ah. I don't have a lot of experience with laptop keyboards, but I think that's normal. Apple's desktop keyboard have dedicated volume and brightness control keys, but since the laptop keyboards are so much smaller, they added the Fn key and made a lot of the keys perform double duty.

If you reverse it to the way it was to begin with, I think Fn-Control-F2 would activate the menu bar. So it depends on which task you think deserves easier access.
 
I do understand the need for keys to do double duty on the smaller notebook keyboards

Mikuro said:
If you reverse it to the way it was to begin with, I think Fn-Control-F2 would activate the menu bar.
Click to expand...

This would make sense to me but unfortunatly it is not how it works. If I reverse it there is no shortcut to the menu bar. I am not sure why it has to be that way but I use the menu shortcut a lot so I will live with Fn-F# for hardware control
 
My mistake. Another option would be to change the shortcuts to use other keys. In System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, double-clicking on any shortcut in the list will allow you to change it to just about anything you want.
 
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