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Comment by transreal | Hacker News Reader

Good post - these features are quite undiscoverable, and I only figured them out because I did them accidentally one day or someone showed me.

Someone at Apple made the determination that "looking simpler" was more important that UX discoverability, and so hid some features under Ctrl/Command clicks.

A worse offender is "Command+Shift+." for showing hidden files - they don't even have a menu item anywhere for it, it's either you know that hidden files is a thing or you don't, and there's no way to discover it by clicking around and paying attention.

While I still prefer macOS to Windows, I agree that Apple could do a bit more to make these hidden features more exposable. E.g. why not let a click on the folder name show you the folder path, why require a "Command"?

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That's one thing that baffles me about MacOS. There is a lot of powerful stuff hidden behind keyboard shortcuts but there is almost no way to find them. It seems a colossal waste of energy to first implement them but then making it very hard to find them.

On iPadOS it's very similar. Sometimes I get two apps on the screen by accident but I have no idea how I did it and there is no way to find out how to do it if you don't do an online search. Good old drop down menus were actually good for something.

Is that a macOS thing, or just a conceptual problem with keyboard shortcuts?

IMHO macOS does a pretty decent job of discoverability for shortcuts as they’ll be listed there in the menu.

edit: originally I doubted whether Windows does this or not. It does! Somehow I missed this despite using Windows every day...

Windows programs absolutely do show shortcut keys in their menus.

http://homepage.eircom.net/~pcengineers/kbguide.html

This is in addition to access keys (also explained in the document above), underlined letters you can type to instantly navigate the menus and select even the items for which no shortcut is defined.

My bad.

Here's what I get on Windows 10 in Firefox, showing both the shortcuts and the menu keys. https://imgur.com/a/EUEr8y5

While it doesn’t solve the issue of not knowing a feature is there in the first place, if there’s something you’d like to do in an app, you can get a long way by hitting “Help” in the menu bar and typing it into the search field. If there are any matches for it you’ll immediately know you can do it, and it will open up the menu and show you exactly where it is (and the keyboard shortcut, if there is one).

This is the primary way I look for power-user or other non-obvious features in new Mac apps.

Menus are still superior to help search for feature discovery because they are an explicit navigable enumeration of the feature set surface; if help doesn't have the right synonyms, you'll be stuck, whereas menu item listing might hint at different ways to accomplish the same end goal.

Mac menus list the keyboard shortcuts for menu items right next to the items.

So do menus on all desktop platforms I've used.

My point is that menus work as a way of exposing functionality and making it discoverable through enumeration in a way that contextual UIs and fashionable techniques of the day don't.

I'm pretty sure that visible shortcuts are a CUA thing. They date way back - even text-mode menu-driven DOS apps had them, e.g. all the Borland IDEs.

FYI the search box in the help menu searches the rest of the menu bar. It's great for feature discovery if you think something might exist but don't know where it is.

To discover SOME of the "hidden" apple key assignments: open any menu at the top of the screen, then press modifier keys alone or in combination.

The menu functions descriptions will change.

For example, in Finder, open the File menu and you should see:

  Close Window  ..... cmd-W

if you press down Option/alt, this will change to:

  Close All   ..... opt-cmd-W

Hidden files are hidden on purpose, because most users have no reason to see them. Arguably, it’s not a good idea to make them more discoverable. Power users will learn about them the first time they try to do a task that requires working with hidden files.

I think most people would agree with that. But I think the point being made is that there should be a better way of figuring out how to do these hidden things if you know they exist, without the use of an internet search.

Sounds like something that should be handled through file permissions, not through hidden/shown. Hiding files is to remove clutter, nothing more.

That's especially baffling because "Cmd-Shift-." is "Cmd->"

Why wouldn't this just be be "Cmd-."? It doesn't seem to be doing anything, at least on the generation of Finder I just tried it on.

IIRC "Cmd-." used to be the MacOS equivalent of "Ctrl-C" in a Unix process.

I thought for sure that holding some combination of option, shift, and control would reveal the command to show all hidden files, and...nope. It’s truly only available as a key command. Wow.

For context, this was only recently added; previously you'd have to do a couple of command line invocations.

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