Doing the apple dance

This is TUAW’s “Tip of the Day” today, and boy has it been useful. Many of my frustrations with Mac OS X and the Finder may have just melted away:

Apparently, you can use Command-Up and Command-Down to navigate through folders.

I’ve been looking for Command-Up since I got my Mac over a year ago.

Somewhat usefully, TUAW’s Mac 101 has a whole section tagged shortcuts.

They also point to the Apple page for shortcuts. I’ve searched and searched for that page in Google and Apple.com and Apple’s help documents - how come I’ve never found it? Human error, I guess.

But there is still something that bothers me. In TUAW’s shortcuts articles they often talk about such-and-such an application being “tremendous value for money” but all it’s doing is filling in a gap in the OS or in documentation standards. As an example, people should not be paying to know what shortcuts an application provides.

Windows UI standards and development tools, and I think more recently the OS itself (though the line for me is blurred slightly through the convenient layer of the Visual Studio .Net IDE) ensure that an application displays its keyboard shortcuts for every command. There are two shortcut types in Windows: The direct command shortcut (e.g. Ctrl-S to save a document) , and the navigational shortcut (e.g. Alt-F for the File menu then X for Exit). They are both labelled in the menus so that if you find a command in the menu, you know what its shortcut is. This is true for contextual menus too.

You can do that in Mac OS X, although it works slightly differently. You press Ctrl-F2 for the menu and then navigate by typing words and using the arrow keys.

But critically, assigning keyboard shortcuts is done very differently in Mac OS X than in Windows and I think that in this case Windows wins. Windows applications manage their own keyboard shortcut assignment (this is bad, and not entirely standardised).

On the other hand, Mac OS X centralises that in the Keyboard control panel preferences pane (this is good), but it doesn’t allow for ambiguity in a hierarchy of menus! That is, if I have three Cut commands in my application’s menus (Edit->Cut, Edit->Sentence->Cut and Edit->Paragraph->Cut) I can’t assign them separate shortcuts! Apple could get around this by allowing “Edit|Cut”, “Edit|Sentence|Cut” and “Edit|Paragraph|Cut” as identifiers, but as far as I can tell they do not.

Furthermore, you have to remember what the menu item you want to assign a shortcut to is called, and type it. That’s right. In a graphical menu-driven UI, you have to TYPE the name of a menu item.

Lastly, but not leastly, how do I pull up a context menu, and why aren’t keyboard shortcuts displayed on that context menu?

Keyboard navigation is one of the major complaints I hear from people switching to Macs, and rightly so. Try as I might, there isn’t a simple solution to some of their problems. The solution to having a right-delete key for example involves installing and configuring a free utility. That’s something that can go wrong, that is inconsistent from one machine to another, and requires redoing when you get a new machine or rebuild.

In short then, I see two major failings in Mac OS X in this arena:

1. Learning curve: Without keyboard shortcuts on the context menu, how can you learn the shortcuts (see Get Info when you right-click on something in Finder - it should show Command-I)?
2. Configuration: It’s ambiguous, but more importantly, error prone. It requires copying by typing, in 2008?! Come on Apple.

When computers were still trying to figure out what they were and keyboards were proprietary affairs, different manufacturers did different things for deleting. Many treated the DELETE/DEL/← keys as a left-delete, mimicking the mechanical left-aligned typewriter. A Last-In-First-Out stack of characters. It just fit in with the typing schema. Others had a Backspace key. Yet others had two DEL keys, one left and one right as it became evident that a right-delete was useful too.

It was the wild west of keyboard design… Debates raged. Lives were put on the line. Backspace or Delete? What should it do? What is a cursor? Where should it go?

What a load of crap, Nixta, stop spouting. The short of it is that just as Sinclair, Commodore, Acorn, Atari, Amstrad and Texas Instruments all found themselves writing their own software and building their own hardware, they invented their own keyboard layouts.

By the time the modern PC’s keyboard was reasonably standardised, there was both a Backspace and Delete key (indeed the Apple II had no Delete, just a Backspace). Incidentally, the Backspace key is horribly misnamed. It doesn’t move the cursor back a space as it would on a typewriter, it deletes the character to the left. But never mind.

As a PC user you get very used to the Backspace and Del keys. Even laptops have them both.

Modern Mac laptops do not. They just have a “delete” key, which does what a PC Backspace key does: left-delete.

However, Mac OS X can handle both left and right-deletes. The absence of a dedicated key shouldn’t stop you.

There are two, no, three possible solutions and one nerdly impossible one:

1. Use an Apple wired keyboard (not a wireless one). This has both left-delete and right-delete keys, just like a 103-key PC keyboard (or I suppose you could just use one of those). That defeats the purpose of a laptop though.
2. Use fn-delete, the Mac OS shortcut for right-delete.
3. Install DoubleCommand, a free bit of software that re-assigns certain keys for you. I have it set up to use the ‘\’ key (just below the ‘delete’ key on a Mac Laptop) to behave as right-delete.
4. Not for mere mortals, or indeed anyone who knows what the outside world is like: Create a keyboard file that redefines your keyboard as you want it.

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