Comment by andrewtj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewtj | Hacker News Reader

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Off the top of my head:

alt-tab == ⌘-tab

Restore == Ctl-F3, arrow key to window in Dock, return

Arbitrary menu item, depends:

Application Menu (left-handside text menus) == Ctl-F2, type enough unique letters to identify the menu (or use arrow keys), return, type enough unique letters to identify the item... repeat till you get to the item you want. If this annoys you, you can implement your own keyboard shortcuts in any native application.

Status Menu (right-handside icon menus) == Ctl-F8, arrows, return.

Equivalent of the start button? Not quite sure what you mean - activate Spotlight ⌘-[Space], type app name perhaps?

I assume you mean Dock when you say launch which is activated by Ctl-F3.

The only one I don't know how to do is fine-grain resizing of a window. If you use OS X though, you'll realise the UI paradigm isn't focused on fine-grained window control though.

A few keys to get to a few menu items really doesn't work since you have to remember them. In windows, you can use the alt key to both arrow through the menu AND to learn the specific hot-keys.

Plus I actually suspect that a many application don't implement the keys you've mentioned since I was definitely at-sea in my efforts to use any keys.

But thanks, I'll have more ammunition the next time I'm stuck Osx-land.

Actually, the keyboard shortcuts do work; I'm pretty comfortable saying that since I use the OS everyday. Also, your suspicions are wrong - every native application implements these shortcut keys.

Don't take this the wrong way, but Windows skills don't translate to other platforms. OS X will feel different, weird and limited if you're not familiar with it as it doesn't do things the way you're used to.

To be honest, I rarely use most of these shortcut keys because I define my own.

A basic example is that it's two keys to start a VPN session on my machine as that's something I do frequently.

A more complicated one is as at the moment I'm doing work on a site that includes screenshots of itself, I have a shortcut key defined that takes a series of screen grabs from different pages in Safari at the appropriate size, converts them to PNG and sticks them in the appropriate folder. Huge time saver.

In short, it seems to me OS X can do anything with a keyboard shortcut that you'd like it to.

Application menu items are searchable with the Help/Search widget, which can be opened with cmd-shift-/.

And if you really want to do fine-grained resizing, just install MercuryMover.

MercuryMover is another $20 add-on.

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