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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

And Apple UI designers (IMO rightfully) were against exactly these hidden context menus. You can see in the older versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers how UI was meant to work: Instead of right-click menus there was the Info button (promimently found in the shortcut list), which opened a non-modal context menu that could be placed anywhere on screen in a persistent way. This then allowed manipulating all the detail object settings with minimal mouse travel and clicks.

I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable.

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Not always. After working for years at Apple I was told (in response to a bug report I filed about missing menu items) that Mac menus might totally change their contents if you PRESSED A MODIFIER KEY. WTF!

So every Mac menu conceivably had (has?) 7 sets of contents, 6 of which are essentially secret. Idiotic.

totally agreed there - these modifiers should go away.

edit: with my post I in no way wanted to indicate that Apple's UI is the pinnacle of design - just that they IMO made the right choice at first by avoiding context menus, or at least keep them optional.

Well, there is this "move to trash" menu item that turns into "really delete" on many file managers. I find it not bad.

If you really need it, you will discover it. Otherwise, you can still go to the trash and really delete the file from there. It's safer than having the really delete item by default, and it's there if you need it.

> I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable

Office products have the worst copy/paste of any software I use. Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

> Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/control-the-formatt...

Now I still consider it shitty, but at least I'm moderately in control.

I just wish that the default was to copy/paste the text and not text, style info, multimedia and who knows what else.

You can change the default.

agreed on copy/paste, though I think that's a problem in general in Microsoft-land due to a lack of standardization across their products. what I meant was specifically the format paste feature (the yellow paintbrush icon in Office apps).

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