Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Mac keyboard shortcuts suck

Wednesday, February 9, 2005

Mac keyboard shortcuts suck

Ok, what's the point of the home and end keys if they don't bring you to the beginning and end of a line of text?! Argh.

Plus, the control key for copy and paste is the Apple key, not the control key, so I can't use my pinky to cut and paste. ~~And, there's no shortcut to move back and forward a word at a time.~~ And why the heck doesn't 'undo' work in this Safari text area? The menu entry is greyed out and everything.

Permalink | 5 Comments | id 6508

11:20 (utc-5)
edited: 11:33 (utc-5)

Comments

Apple key + left arrow and apple key + right arrow jump you to the beginning and end of a line, while option-left and option-right jump you to the beginning and end of a word. It took me quite a while to find those when I first got my Mac.

∴ Simon Willison | 9-Feb-2005 11:30am est | http://simon.incutio.com/ | #6978

There's an option key?

∴ Keith | 9-Feb-2005 11:32am est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #6979

The option key is also known as the "alt" key. The Apple key is also called the "command" key. There appears to be no reason whatsoever for this dual naming, or for the Apple key having two strange symbols on it.

∴ Simon Willison | 9-Feb-2005 11:38am est | http://simon.incutio.com/ | #6980

Also, in most Cocoa apps you can use Emacs style key bindings. So, ctrl+a and ctrl+e move you to the beginning and end of a line, etc. This mechanism is heavily customizable (see http://www.deepsky.com/~misaka/MacOSX/KeyBindings.html).

∴ Andrew Wooster | 9-Feb-2005 11:57am est | http://www.nextthing.org/ | #6981

The lack of an undo is incomprehensible to me. Its so very un-mac-like. Hopefully this will be fixed in Tiger. There is a hack called Saft which claims to fix this among other things:

http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/

I don't use it though. I am wary of things like this.

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