Macs have always been built around the mouse (which makes it a little harder to defend the lack of a two-button mouse for so long), and it shows... though OS X does give it essentially a command line underpinning.
Case in point -- for a long while now, I've been annoyed by the fact that using OS X and Firefox, when you try to tab between form fields on a Web page, it skips drop-down menus. Since I was doing most of my stuff on the PC at work, this wasn't a huge problem and I never bothered to look into it, but now that I'm exclusively Mac, I found it intensely annoying.
I did a little searching around for an extension or something to change, so I found to my chagrin that it's just a simple settings change in the Keyboard & Mouse preference in Leopard (and probably previous versions) -- in the section marked, "Full keyboard access: In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move the keyboard focus between:" change the selection from "Text boxes and lists only" to "All Controls":
Why this isn't the default is baffling to me.
I'm sure I'm the last person to figure this out. (However, remember: Just because you know something doesn't mean that it's common knowledge, and just because you didn't know something doesn't mean it's obscure.)
Now that that's squared away, in System 7 and 8, I used to have an extension that assigned hotkeys to menu items (similar to Windows menus) -- I have to find the OS X equivalent.
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5 comments:
dude, thanks for the keyboard tip. i've been wondering about that myself...
I WIN!
You rock! That has annoyed me forever.
I do need to challenge your assumption that Mac OS X is built around a one-button mouse.
No one I know uses the one button mouse supplied by Apple. I have always purchased a much nicer multiple button mouse by the likes of Kensington.
Right click sub menus have been a part of OS X since it was first released. Most designers and other creative types live by right click on a Mac. It works exactly as it does in the Windows world and the right-click menus can be modified...just like in Windows.
Apple has just been stubborn for no good reason to release a functioning multiple button mouse (I don't count the Mighty Mouse as one since you have to do finger acrobatics to get the right click feature to work).
Thars my 2 cents.
Anon: I said that the Mac OS was built around the mouse, not necessarily the one-button mouse. But I don't even need to weasel out -- look at the history of it, and note that I didn't limit myself to OS X. If you didn't have a mouse in OS 7-9, you were pretty much out of luck.
Also note how long it took Apple to explicitly embrace the multi-button mouse. Holding down the control key to access right-click was a particularly kludgy workaround.
Working in Windows (up to XP, anyway, I don't know Vista), you could do everything -- including moving windows -- with keyboard commands. In some places, it's actually useful -- like hitting alt > File > N to Rename (and where the active letters were underscored).
Thank you!!!! You just saved me SO much time doing my notes for work!!! Thanks for sharing!
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