Safari file upload trick »

Navigating with the keyboard

I’ve found that in my line of work I do a lot of typing. I write code for a living, and in my spare time I write a load of old crap.

Tappa tappa tappa. Typety Type. Clickety Clack.

So it became much easier to navigate between and around my computer systems using keyboard shortcuts. On a windows PC, context menus were reachable by keyboard alone. Alt-F would open the File menu. You could use the arrows to navigate the menu structure from there. Ctrl-Space brought up the window’s control menu. Ctrl-E would open explorer. Tab and Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab let you navigate through all windows and components of windows.

So, how does Apple fare?

You can set up short-cuts to match any single menu item using System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts, but that fails already when an application has the same text for multiple submenus. Hopefully, readers will show me how to assign a shortcut to a specific menu tree.

Quicksilver helps tremendously by allowing you to open and act on things quickly, but it doesn’t help within an application.

But here we go. The trick is in the Ctrl-Keys.

Ctrl-F2 will set focus to the menu bar. From there, the arrow keys do what you want, and keys can navigate by spelling.

Ctrl-F8 will set focus to the status bar, but there appear to be two kinds of applications in the status bar - those that register themselves properly (Apple items and MenuMeters, for example), and others (Quicksilver, FreeMem, Evernote, Plaxo Toolbar, etc. etc.). You can’t navigate to the latter!

In a Finder window, pressing Enter opens an item in Windows. In Mac OS X it renames it (like F2 in Windows). Command-O Opens it in Mac OS X.

Windows overall seems slightly more consistent. I’d still like to know how to get a context menu with Mac OS X.

Tags:

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Usage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 2 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Yeah, this is such a pervasive problem - nobody gets it right.

    Window management, by which I mean moving and resizing, using the keyboard is a similar bugbear. On Linux this is obviated to some extent by Compiz, which lets you bind keys to all sorts of window shuffling operations. On Windows I have been delighted to discover 'WinSplit Revolution', which in intended to east the pain of moving windows around dual screens, but also serves up a fabulous side-dish of brilliant Ctrl+Alt+numpad keybinds. For example, Ctrl+Alt+6 (on the right side of the keypad) will snap the current window to the right side of the screen, vertically maximised. Repeat presses cycle the width of the window through 1/3, 1/2, 2/3 of the screen width. I love this to death.

    I also already love love love your new blog Nick!
    • ^
    • v
    Why, thank you, Tartus meus. Much appreciated. And you're the only one to know about it so far! 100% success rate.

    I think I can rewrite this article a little bit better - it was a rambling prototype of a thoughtsplurge really.

    That said, I think that there's much to be said for helping Windows users learn how to more efficiently navigate too. Switching from mouse to keyboard to mouse all the time is very inefficient and depending on how you work it really might not even be the easiest, let alone most efficient way to do things.

    I think I will pull together various Mac hints for working with the keyboard and tie them in with applications like Quicksilver and Sizzling keys that can really help. That said, I'd be happy to include similar articles for Windows users.
 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus