Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

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OSX is not keyboard accessible by default, its is not however "not keyboard-accessible". Go into system preferences and turn on keyboard navigation and adjust the keymaps to your hearts content. Heck add scripts to execute on certain key combinations if you want. And if you like you can remap what its defaults are to whatever you like.

OSX is setup to be transparent to novice users. That doesn't mean it cannot be setup to be used with a keyboard. Just that the default, which for 99% of users doesn't allow they keyboard to interfere with a novice user.

I can get OSX to do quite literally everything from the keyboard, I'm not sure how one can argue it isn't keyboard accessible when it is trivial to turn on. And being the 1% of the population that cares about it, power users shouldn't be afraid of learning how to turn it on.

Hopefully this didn't come across as harsh, but I just get annoyed at people that equate OSX = mouse only interface. When you can tell the whole idea behind the interface is to make default things simple to use with a single mouse button and make the rest possible. Despite what we think the actual idea of more than one mouse button is about as foreign as trying to understand Russian to an Englishman. Its more cognitive load than most care about.

I turned it on the moment I ran OS X for the first time. There were still many instances where I actually couldn't tab-navigate to some controls. Not to mention that there are no keyboard accelerators for anything in sight. That aspect alone makes it many times less accessible than Windows/Gnome/KDE.

I haven't used OS X in a few years, so I don't know if things have changed now, but I don't think they have keyboard accelerators nowadays either.

I'll admit I haven't found an application that doesn't let me tab to controls. Sounds like the developer messed up when creating his app or isn't setting the controls properly on the fly.

Can you remember what application it was? I'm curious now and like dumb challenges like this.

  > I can get OSX to do quite literally everything from the keyboard,

I call foul on that one.

Perhaps if you said "I can get OSX to eventually do everything from the keyboard". I say that because of the 9 menu items showing for Chrome right now (if one includes the Apple), I can get to exactly one of them using Ctrl-F2. If I wanted to jump to the History menu, it is Ctrl-F2 followed by five right-arrow presses. If I were on Windows, I bet a Euro it would be alt-H or some such.

I just get annoyed at people who think that an option to turn on tabbing onto controls and to hotkey onto the Apple menu (or the dock) somehow equates with the incredible keyboard-friendliness of some other OSes.

On OS X, I can get directly to any menu item by pressing cmd+? and then using the search. This is better if you have a vague idea of what you want, although admittedly, Windows has a better implementation for keyboard browsing of menu items. I vastly prefer the former, though.

The former is preferable for complex applications such as photoshop, but the latter is absolutely indispensable for frequently-used applications, as it's much faster.

Actually in Windows the application specific shortcuts often start with Ctrl. In this case Ctrl+H takes you to the history tab. Doesn't something like that work on OS X?

No, and that was my complaint. The post by pdhborges below enlightened me that one can use letters after pressing Ctrl-F2, but it is still quite awkward and I believe it is disruptive to flow.

type Ctrl-F2 and then "hi". Problem solved.

Three keystrokes, the first of which is awkward and the rest of which are menu-dependent. In other OSes it's just alt+accelerator, for anything you want.

I had no idea. Thank you for this!

Turns out, it works for the newly expanded submenu also. Still more typing, but a vast improvement.

Chrome in Windows doesn't have a menu :P You're right for all other applications, however.

It does if one taps the Alt key, IIRC. Same for Firefox 4 (onward).

I just tried it, nope. I thought so too, but that seems to not be the case.

So history is Command+Y in chrome by default, though yes if you activated the apple menu and key over I agree thats annoying. Command+H is universally hide window, but you could change it if you were annoyed enough.

Its not just "turn on tabbing onto controls and to hotkey onto the Apple menu". Though I admit, I don't use the menubar from the keyboard as most of the time I just use the shortcuts that activate the menu item.

Don't believe me? You are partially right with the eventually remark however, not all applications allow or even try to have shortcuts for every menu option. Lets add a shortcut to something that doesn't have it in Chrome. I'll choose the extensions menu under Window in Chrome just to be fair as you mentioned the app.

System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts tab, then Clicky the + button. Choose your Google Chrome.app dir. Then "Extensions" and since I'm trying to not collide with things, I'm using Commmand+Shift+E, and click back and then voila, command shift e gives me the ability to activate what I couldn't before. Works for me and now I never have to click on a menubar either. Or am I just missing a use case in windows where normally the first letter allows you to activate the menu? I admit i've never used that even in windows.

More work than windows by default? Sure. But I'd call that good. As for apps that don't allow tab navigation or other such things, the only one's that seem to be the biggest offenders are browsers. Firefox need a few about:config changes to adjust its retarded on osx default focus behavior and everything is peachy. I've not hit anything I can't do in chrome, Ctrl+tab/etc... cycles tabs etc... Is there something specific you can't do in chrome? Are you referring to the wrench menu perhaps?

OS X/Cocoa includes some Emacs-style key bindings by default (see http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/system-bindings.html), so I don't think leaving other key shortcuts out makes the keyboard "interfere with a novice user" as you say. Dialog boxes don't support keyboard accelerators other than Esc and Enter, and the Finder doesn't support things like cut-and-paste or opening folders with the Enter key, and I find these things incredibly frustrating having used Windows in the past. Try doing something simple like moving a file from a directory to its parent in Finder versus Explorer.

More on the "Cocoa Text System": http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....

Oh man, moving a file to its parent. You'd basically have to copy it, go up (I'm not sure if backspace goes up, does it?), paste it, find the folder again, go back down (or just back, i guess), find the file and delete it.

A clusterfuck, I can't fathom how some people can actually argue at length that OS X is fantastically keyboard-accessible.

$ mv filename ..

I've used unix os's for longer than I have windows, I consider the terminal to be "keyboard-accessible". You can argue that point if you like, but the terminal is always a command tab away. That with osascript and the open command means i don't have much use for Finder. If I could keep Finder from restarting it wouldn't even be running on my system.

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