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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

Every macOS application has a command palette in the help menu: command-shift-/ will bring it up and you can incrementally search all the commands in the menus.

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As an infrequent Mac user, how is this stuff discoverable? The OS seems willfully obfuscated to cater for some notional lowest common denominator user. Whenever I find myself using someone else's Mac, they never know any keyboard shortcuts or keyboard-plus-mouse-button context menus. It's bewildering and wildly frustrating. I find myself asking "surely this isn't how you always do this, there must be a better way?" but I only ever get shrugs in reply.

Admittedly, these are non-techy folks. But they are daily Mac users. It's weird, like the OS discourages curiosity and experimentation.

And then there are those times when I stupidly assume things, like how it will surely be trivial to remote desktop from my laptop into a Mac while someone else is logged into a different account on the Mac. What a shit-show. My reaction: "are you f*cking kidding with how horrendous this is?" Mac owner: shrug.

Bah. Now I'm just getting narky. Rant over :)

Most of the keyboard shortcuts for a particular application are right next to the menu item. The command palette I’m talking about is clearly visible in the help menu: my theory is that people no longer browse the menus of a new application the way I would back in the NT 4.0 days.

The system-wide shortcuts are a bit less discoverable but, they’re there if you know where to look: either search “keyboard shortcuts” in the os help system or go to system preferences > keyboard > shortcuts.

Thanks for this, I'll be sure to check out the keyboard preferences next time. I was referring to the "command-shift-/" key combo you mentioned when asking how to discover things in Mac OS, since it really feels that power-user functionality is hidden.

I'm not exactly a Windows fan, but (generally speaking) in a standard windowed program, just hitting alt focuses the menu. Windows is almost entirely navigable by keyboard by default, without a mouse. It's much more discoverable and efficient.... although that's been tanking since Win 95 :)

That command-shift-/ shortcut is listed in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.

Also, if I use the Finder help menu to search "keyboard shortcuts", it gives me a local help article "Use macOS keyboard shortcuts". This article talks about a bunch of ways to find keyboard shortcuts and also links to this knowledge base article: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 (This is actually a sort of step backwards, from when I did exactly this around '07: at that point, the Mac Help system actually listed a bunch of handy keyboard shortcuts and didn't rely on online resources for them).

Perhaps I'm biased, but I find navigating application menus on MacOS infinitely easier due to the fact that it's location is constant and dictated by Apple. On Windows (or even Linux) I have to go searching for the menu items for each new application I'm using, and some feature (like quitting) seems to often be purposefully hidden away. Infuriating if you ask me.

I’d guess that most people don’t use keyboard shortcuts at all, and only very few use anything besides copy, paste, and maybe save. People are shocked when I “command+l, c, t, v, enter” to duplicate the current tab.

No need for copy-pasting, just doing "Command+L, Command+Return" will duplicate your current tab. Works on Chrome and Safari.

Wow! Thanks for the tip. Never knew that.

That particular one is cmd-? So it’s pretty darn mnemonic. Pretty sure it’s also spelled out in the search bar of the Help menu bar item.

The ability to search menus is pretty discoverable. The search field is the first thing in the menu when you click the Help menu bar in any app.

But of course the shortcut to jump to the search area is completely undiscoverable, as are many macOS features. You can see it if you go to preferences -> keyboard -> shortcuts -> app shortcuts. (And you can also reconfigure the shortcut key, or reconfigure any shortcut in any app. That feature I love)

Back in the day I used Alfred on OS X... basically a system-wide command palette. Lots of its features now exist in Spotlight natively- not just file/folder search- it can do math equations, dictionary lookups, email search with date/keyword matching, currency and unit conversions, language translation, it also supports boolean operators.

I have yet to find a similar functionality from any other OS.

And even better, you can just go into system preferences and turn off what you don't want!

At one point I had a newish version of OS X spotlight pared down to be about as functional as the Windows 7 start menu Search. If I had wanted command-space to be closer in feature parity to a Windows 10 start menu, it's approximately five reasonably intuitive mouse clicks to get to the settings prefpane with those checkboxes. I too have yet to find similarly well made functionality from any other major-ish desktop OS.

Cmd-, opens spotlight preferences while spotlight is open

Alfred was really cool. I replaced what I liked about Spotlight in Xubuntu by using combination of Guake, XFCE Whisker Menu Search Actions, and DE keyboard shortcuts bound to various scripts. Then I added some more stuff that I never knew I wanted from Spotlight.

I couldn't go back now, TBH, without using some kind of Mac OS native scripting components.

I still use Alfred daily! Its development is going strong.

I love Alfreds custom workflows. Half the time I’m using it the same way I’d use Spotlight, but I’m also using it to trigger custom workflows constantly. (Which often just call out to CLI utils or run zsh/Apple/Swift scripts, integrations that Alfred makes easy)

I also appreciate its global hot key support. For example, I’ve setup the F14/F15 keys to adjust brightness on an external monitor. (Just by having a workflow call out to `ddctl`)

For me, Ulauncher was game-changer on Linux.

Yeah, this is a great feature! I would like to have an option to move the menu into the into the window under the toolbar or floating like the spotlight window since it's a little less eye travel, but nonetheless it's very handy to have the ability to activate menu items without having a dedicated keyboard shortcut.

Raycast has this neat feature called Navigation → Search Menu Items which is essentially the Help → Search feature of macOS.

However, you can bind it to any shortcut, so binding it to Cmd+P would give you a command palette in any app (and then you can exclude e.g. Sublime Text/Merge who already have their own palettes).

This is one of those tiny seemingly inconsequential things that keeps me hooked on Mac OS

This was available on ubuntu unity in 2012.

That’s great for Ubuntu!

Except they dropped the feature when they switched to GNOME 3 in 2017.

There's Plotinus: https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus

I've tried it, but it doesn't work in most of the apps I use like LibreOffice, Firefox, Double Commander.

KDE also does it: https://pointieststick.com/2021/05/21/this-week-in-kde-kcomm...

That's very nice. I really ought to make the switch to KDE, at least for a while to see what else I might be missing.

There is also a lovely utility called Paletro which extracts menu items for arbitrary apps and thus provides a universal command palette interface.

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