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Comment by NBJack | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things that pisses me off about MacOS. Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component. In a pinch, the keyboard is your friend, at least until your pointing device is back up.

MacOS: lol, sorry, bluetooth settings require a pointing device to add a new one. Keyboard navigation? Sure. It worked up until this part, but we didn't bother to allow the add button to be selectable. Why? Reasons.

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Did you enable this setting? If yes, can you tell me more what's missing?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchlc06d1059/...

Doesn't this require foresight that your mouse may fail? It isn't enabled by default.

Any other OS, you'll be able to at least tab around without the mouse.

It wasn't on the page linked above but on this page [1] at the bottom it reads:

> To quickly turn Full Keyboard Access, Sticky Keys, Slow Keys, or the Accessibility Keyboard on or off using the Accessibility Shortcuts panel, press Option-Command-F5 (or if your Mac or Magic Keyboard has Touch ID, quickly press Touch ID three times).

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlae61a6de/...

To your credit, this does indeed work, but I won't retract my point. It's super-kludgy to go through everything like this, and I definitely can't leave it on all the time. I'm spoiled by the innate tab, shift-tab options of other operating systems. Ironically, when I tried to turn on the accessibility feature just through keyboard nav of Settings, I failed to get to the checkbox (there is at least a global Accessibility shortcut...if it's switched on).

I'm at a loss to explain why this particular navigation issue shows up in the Settings app. Other, less critical parts of the OS actually work fine.

What's missing is discoverability -- something Apple used to claim to care about.

Hilariously, I was once trying to install MacOS to a HP university laptop, hackintosh style, and got into a situation where after hours of kernel panics and boot configurations I finally got far enough to see the MacOS install screen on the display!

I did not have working trackpad or usb, but undeterred I continued with keyboard navigation through the install menu, going further and further, partitioning and formatting drives and whatnot, until finally I hit the language selection dropdown, one of the last steps in the install process. This screen, although simple, did not have keyboard accessibility. I tried everything I could but never got the mouse to work, and was stuck at the language select. Frustratingly the screen also played some weird pop music full blast which I never was able to lower the volume of.

I still think somehow they knew, that they were mocking me, knowing that the trackpad would always work on a real mac, and only kids with too much free time would be stuck on the final step of the install process...

Interesting. Did this change in the last decade? I remember MacOS as being very keyboard-friendly out-of-the-box and awesome for automating GUI. But then again, the last MacOS I used was 10.6, around 15 years ago. And I heard automating GUI suffered in recent versions. So they lost on the keyboard-abilities too, I guess.

The worst for me is being able to select the non-default option in an alert window. Sometimes CMD + 'the first letter of the word in the button' works, but that's like a 30% chance. How is there not a standard for that? I'd even accept the arrow keys + Enter at this point.

If the non-default option is a cancellation or negative action, cmd-period should usually work.

This is a great tip that I didn't know about. Thank you. It doesn't work for Numbers, since I need to DELETE not Cancel the file changes, but I'm sure it'll work in a ton of other places.

Delete button in dialog: cmd-delete.

(Edit: Just tested this in numbers, works fine. In cases where the button isn't correctly tagged as a "delete" button it might not -- in that case, cmd-<first letter of button content> will almost always work.)

Absolute legend

Okay, one more question. When I have multiple terminal tabs open with processes running, I get an alert window with three options: Review Windows, Terminate Processes, Cancel:

https://imgur.com/a/mNQNRaI

I can cancel with CMD + (period), but I can't seem to select Terminate Processes with anything except the mouse, since it isn't the default option and it isn't cancel.

Any idea if this one is possible without turning on the keyboard navigation accessibility option?

It /should/ be cmd-t, but just confirmed that that doesn't work. I'd consider this a bug, and would suggest filing a radar for it.

I’ve never done that before but will! How fun!

System Settings / Accessibility / Keyboard / Full Keyboard Access

This is macOS we're talking about. You can move the pointer with your face if you want (or more likely, if you need to).

Often space cycles this, for some reason.

This is a nice tip! This does not work for MacOS alerts that want you to enter data (like a file name to save), but I will be using this and the other guy's CMD + . (period) tip as much as possible in every other scenario.

> How is there not a standard for that?

There was, long ago, in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.

Which apple always sets an example for by not following.

Had to use a Mac at a job last year. It wasn't used much so the mouse wasn't charged. Why oh why is the mouse unusable when it's charging!?

My Bose headphones also aren't usable while charging. Very frustrating. I don't care if there are technical reasons. It's just bad UX.

Same with my Sony headphones. Never understood the reasoning.

Allegedly, for the Mac mouse the reason is so that people can't use it permanently plugged in, because cables are ugly and against "the Apple philosophy".

My cordless beard trimmer doesn’t run when plugged in, so you have to wait for it to charge before using it. When getting ready in the morning, you can’t sit around for an hour waiting for it to charge enough to function.

It makes no sense.

I mean from an EE perspective it makes some sense, because you save some on circuitry (not like a lot in absolute cost, but your cordless beard trimmer probably doesn't have a lot of margin).

So the real reason is probably just to make it cheaper. (Well maybe not in the Mac case)

Yeah in case of the beard trimmer it's because it uses quite a lot of power so you need a beefy adapter to run it. These often still use NiMH cells and trickle charge with 100mA or so.

For a mouse this is all irrelevant because it uses so little power that it can easily be powered by a regular USB.

Also, many bathrooms don't have sockets anyway. At least not nearby (and cooper is expensive too these days)

Cordless trimmers are generally waterproof because some people use those under the shower.

Having them non operational when charging can very well be a safety measure so that they don't use it while plugged in.

There's really no excuse for headsets like Bose where such circuitry is a rounding error in the hefty price tag.

Hell, they even have USB circuitry that enumerates as an actual device on the bus but couldn't be arsed to have it be a proper audio class device.

Supposedly it's by design. The justification being something along the lines of "you're doing it wrong" if you have to drag the cable around while mousing.

I had a first generation Mac mini, and I was playing around with mouse settings and accidentally changes some setting that basically disabled my mouse. The problem was the button or control to change it back didn't work via keyboard. I eventually recovered but came very close to wiping the machine.

I just tried, and if you hit 'Tab' a couple of times, it will select the 'Connect' button that shows up after the name of the discovered devices.

From time to time I need this to re-pair with my, very old, logitech wireless mouse, that's why I knew it is totally possible with just the keyboard.

This issue was with 'Add'. My Mini is still hampered by this flaw.

It's not ALL bad, when I recently replaced my 2012 MacBook Pro with a 2024 Air M3, I was pleased to see that Apple FINALLY allows tabbing in system pop menus for things like Save, Delete, Close and selecting those options with the Space bar. Not sure when that was added as default behaviour, but I always found this frustrating coming from Windows. The interesting thing is that precisely one app I used on the 2012 MBP - Ableton Live Digital Audio Workstation - always allowed keying through popups flawlessly - so the underlying capability was there.

I wonder if VoiceControl can be turned on without a mouse, and then one might be able to use VoiceControl to add a pointing device without currently having any pointing device.

I’ve only tried VoiceControl very very briefly and it was a bit difficult to get it to do what I meant that it should do, I seem to remember. But might be worth trying it a bit more.

macOS also really had great keyboards shortcuts. Maybe even more than Windows. But Apple also plastered them over :(

>Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component.

Windows abandoned that from Windows 10 onwards, and Windows 11 is even worse.

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