Comment by alleyshack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alleyshack | Hacker News Reader

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> basically, you can move around with CMD+Arrow. Up goes up a directory, down goes down a directory (or opens the file). Left / Right go forward / back in history, like a browser.

This is really helpful to know - it's one of my biggest bugaboos about using Finder & navigating the Mac GUI.

On the other hand, I suspect this kind of obscure key-based shortcut is a big part of why Macs don't feel intuitive to a lot of users. How could I have known this shortcut exists? It's not broadcast anywhere obvious. My options for finding all these obscure shortcuts aren't great. I could scroll through a submenu in the Settings pane, hoping to find something that looks like it says the thing I'm trying to do (and then that I can figure out what keys it means, since Apple key symbology is VERY arcane). I could stumble across a mention of the shortcut in a forum like this. Or I could Google in the hope of finding something - though that assumes I believe it's doable in the first place, which I didn't in this particular case.

It would also help if Apple chose easier / more intuitive keyboard shortcuts. A "shortcut" which both is the only way to do something, and also requires pressing a minimum of four seemingly-random keys, is not a shortcut at all - it's a mental load on the user that they just have to hold in their heads forever.

Yeah, I remember being frustrated about the discoverability when I started using Mac OS.

Shortcuts mostly appear in the menus, but I remember one in particular being elusive: cmd + down. I've found it out by asking a friend.

I think there is supposed to be a method to the madness, though it's maybe less and less clear nowadays, especially with applications that don't implement them correctly (such as MS Office, electron apps, etc) and people being very used to Windows' conventions.

For example, the modifier keys' names are usually an indication of what you can achieve with them.

CMD (the "flower-like" key, directly next to the space bar) is usually the one used to produce... commands. As in Copy, Save, etc.

Then you have your ALTernative / Option, which usually modifies some other key's usual behaviour. You can obtain dead keys with it. ALT+e / e = é. etc. It also works in menus to obtain alternative actions. You can click a menu, press alt, and see the entries change.

And CTRL deals with control characters. ctrl-c in the terminal, line editing (ctrl-a in any text field goes to the beginning of the line, etc). It's not clear to me why right click is obtained with control and not alt, though...

> You can click a menu, press alt, and see the entries change.

That is insane. Who came up with that? Why do some entries lose their ellipsis when you hold alt? How is anyone expected to know any of this?

I think it's in the "mental model". You're kind of "expected" to know that "option" will produce an "optional / alternate" behavior. It's kind of like windows. How are you supposed to know that win+left will move the window to the side?

At least, on macOS, if you press OPT, the entries will change. On Windows, if you click right → delete, the file isn't deleted. It's moved to the recycle bin. "How are you supposed to know that?". On Mac, it says "move to trash" or similar. Now say you don't want that. If you hold Shift and click delete, it actually deletes it. But if you hold Shift while looking at the Windows menu, it still says "delete".

There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too. They each come with a mental model which may be closer or further from the user's.

I think the issues we see nowadays come up because many apps work the same everywhere, and people may switch between systems more often, so figure since <app> works the same, everything works the same.

It's also hard to think that what comes naturally is actually a mental model that's been ingrained and not something "absolute".

I guess this is why computers used to have manuals, but who reads those anymore?

Yeah, I ultimately don’t understand the complaints about unintuitiveness: what makes a system intuitive is that you’ve internalized its conventions. macOS has its own set of conventions and they apply pretty consistently across Apple’s first-party applications and native (Cocoa) applications. I learned most of them when I switched to Macs in ‘08 and they’re now “intuitive” to me and they “just work” in most applications I use. I went through the same learning process when I was about seven on Windows and when I was like 13 on Linux.

> How are you supposed to know that win+left will move the window to the side?

You're not. Shortcuts are a power user thing. If you want to move the window you drag it.

> There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too.

Oh definitely. It just seems to me that OSX is exceptionally bad at telegraphing these things. On windows and even linux most all features have something visible to clue you in to their existence. OSX seems to do its best to hide things instead.

This shortcut is clearly mentioned in the menus.

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