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Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea, but: is Puppertino as pro-mouse and anti-keyboard-navigation as Mac OS seems to be?

I love my Mac, I really do, but I do find the mouse focus frustrating. For example, there is not, AFAIK, a simple way to navigate menus, e.g., Windows, without the mouse. There may be, and I may simply be ignorant, but I haven’t found it yet.

There are keyboard shortcuts, but they can be frustrating. E.g., I don’t know what changed recently, but I have used gmail with Safari for years, and just recently, Safari started swallowing all of the Gmail formatting shortcuts.

It’s not a constant battle, keeping keyboard navigation working, but it is a tiring and repetitive one.

How does Puppertino make accessibility easier?

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> anti-keyboard-navigation as Mac OS seems to be?

This is total nonsense. macOS has always had the most consistent built-in keyboard navigation of any OS I can think of.

Sorry, really? You can't even tab between controls in dialog boxes by default on a fresh install without turning on "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls", which you ironically can't enable using the keyboard. Seriously, go try it: open System Preferences and try to do _literally anything_ without using the mouse.

Even Finder is wildly unintuitive at times: Enter renames a file, while cmd+O opens it? Or cmd+down, apparently. Press space to show the quick preview of a file, and then cmd+O to open it: the quick preview morphs into the Preview app. But then press cmd+Q, and instead of quitting, it turns back into quick preview.

While I'm a macOS user full time, my experience is completely the opposite of yours. I've constantly had to learn weird nuances of how Apple has managed to make keyboard navigation more complicated than it needs to be.

Except for the re-implemented versions of apps in the recent releases where they seem to use catalyst.

No keyboard shortcuts whatsoever.

When I was trying to use it keyboard only, I never could remember the magic shortcuts to access the menu bars, even after tweaking system preferences. Using the keyboard with Windows or Linux was way easier, IMO.

For very limited definitions of had, most and any.

gnome-shell enters the chat.

Apple icon -> System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> checkbox for "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls"

I found this setting while googling last week after getting frustrated that Firefox wasn't letting me tab to links as I expected when it worked just fine in Chrome.

Interesting. How do I first get focus on the menu bar without clicking with the mouse?

Honestly, I have no idea. I did not know about your suggestion, so that's a TIL for me, but if I am going to click to get to the menu bar, it's not much of a solution.

(In Safari, tab takes me around the page. In terminal, it does what I expect, command/line completion. Only after I click on a menu does it get me anywhere. And it's a good the arrow keys do the same thing, because once one gets to Help, tab is stuck in the search field.)

System Preferences > Accessibility > Keyboard > Navigation then enable full keyboard.

The function has existed since at least 2002 when I started using OS X full time, though it did just take me almost 5 seconds to find the current location of it by googling (I enable it via defaults).

Wow, is that ever awful in terminal! Talk about poorly thought out.

And it doesn't provide the feature I was inquiring about, accessing the menu bar, at least not AFAICT. I may be missing something. While I've had Macs for years, and mostly use the keyboard, I've simply accepted that some things require a mouse. It's the old tradeoff: current muscle memory works kinda well, is it worth research and retraining?

Good, effective keyboard navigation is the ONLY thing I like about those times I have to use Windows. The trackpad is wrong, mouse scroll is wrong, so much is wrong, but being able to jump about without the mouse is really nice.

(After using NextStep years (well, decades) ago and feeling personally triggered and antagonized by Steve's refusal to support PageUp/PageDown "because they are not pages" (no, they're screens dude, flex a bit, get real), I was pleasantly surprised that Mac OS supported PageUp/PageDown.

There's also Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" which is a separate thing (that arguably should be enabled by default).

They both should be. It's like shipping a set of scissors in a container that requires scissors to open.