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Comment by austinjp | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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.

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)

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.

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