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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the constant emphasis on mouse use, ever since the first Macintosh, has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter"; I've noticed that even early Windows is very usable with only a keyboard (the Alt, underlined letters, and arrow keys method is particularly well-designed), whereas e.g. classic MacOS is basically unusable without a mouse.

In later versions they added keyboard access, but it still feels like it was done as a bare-minimum concession and not originally planned.

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I had the opposite experience with MacOS. I hold every OS I've used since the early aughts up against MacOS 9 and they are all lacking in terms of keyboard navigation. Maybe it was because I had the previous 10 years to practice, but I felt I could do almost anything in pre-OSX MacOS with the keyboard, only relying on the mouse for application-specific stuff like photo editing. Navigating, filtering, opening files and folders were all incredibly easy.

In KDE it's pretty much a joke every time I have to save-as. Can't even get through that filesystem menu without a mouse unless it supports <ctrl>-l. Dolphin is slightly better, especially if you enable the console pane to make it easier to switch to the command line, but it's still way behind Apple's finder from 1999.

but I felt I could do almost anything in pre-OSX MacOS with the keyboard

How do you open the menus and browse through them to find and select the option you want?

IIRC for the most part option-f would bring me to the file menu. I could down-arrow to scroll through it or hit the right arrow to move to the next menu. In that way I could navigate pretty well.

> has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter";

I think you would be surprised at just how powerful the keyboard subsystem in osx is and how malleable it is with some programs or even just editing the plist shortcuts. every menu item in any application can be given a per app or universal shortcut in `system preferences | keyboard | shortcuts | app shortcuts`

You can also use a thing like hammerspoon to do whatever you can imagine basically too... i have a few things for window manipulations via hammerspoon.

You can set up very complex keyboard re-mappings/shortcuts using something like karabiner elements.

you can also change the keyboard access to be navigable via tab in keyboard settings too.

and you can access the menu via ctrl-f2 by default. those settings are changeable too via the keyboard preference pane.

i think you'd be surprised at how much apple cares about accessibility so keyboard nav is not just a power user thing.

At the end of the day I think apple put a lot of thought into the UI and i'd feel pretty stymied going back to windows.(though now the power utilities finally let you remap the windows key to something more useful like ctrl.

I was talking about pre-OSX.

Except you can't bind every menu item: some menu names are dynamic, so you can't bind to them, and not all the keys are supported, and there is no left/right modifier differentiation. Also, you have to retype the full command path by hand, which is insane, so you can't do that either (you should be able to just hover over a command and press keybind to rebind)

Even with the awesomeness of Karabiner Elements there are some unfortunate limitations

But yeah, I'd be surprised if it were a powerful system, that's so rare in the keyboard land...

Can’t you handle a lot of that with Automator? Honestly it’s funny to see so many people saying Mac is terrible at this when I can’t imagine a worse OS for shortcuts than windows and Linux you have to script everything. Mac managed to make it user friendly and scriptable at the same time.

A lot of what? What's your Automator handler that I can select a dynamic menu item and change those two keybinds with my arbitrary key combo?

Also, how is it user friendly to require users to retype the full menu taxonomy???

use hammerspoon[0] if you are so dead set on making this edgecase work. on the whole the system is quite flexible.

there's also applescript that can do a lot of other things too. I dislike the language but it's fairly powerful too.

[0] http://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.application.html#getMenuI...

I'm not dead set, that's why I wouldn't waste time on writing a "this can take a little while to complete, because quite a large number of round trips are required to the source application, to get the information" in another bad language when it's much simpler to use Karabiner to send the offending keybind

By the way, what would I do with this menu info, is there another function to permanently rebind a given menu item?

I was just pointing a few fundamental flaws in this "surprisingly powerful" system

you can write a hammerspoon script that will intercept some hotkey you want to use for that menu item and select it yes.

I don't get it, this is much worse vs a direct rebind, which is instant

Also, this brings confusion between the key shown in the menu and the key that is used to activate it, is the Mac ecosystem powerful enough to fix this little usability snag?

>What's your Automator handler that I can select a dynamic menu item and change those two keybinds with my arbitrary key combo?

no clue, I don't use automator, but from what I understand of applescript and automator this should be completely possible. For what it's worth I use Hammerspoon like the other commentor and it's by far the best system I've seen for any OS. Also the more people that use it the better it gets so I highly recommend it.

>Also, how is it user friendly to require users to retype the full menu taxonomy???

I mean... you're able to change any arbitrary menu item in any program that exists. That's extremely powerful. I don't really know how you would make it make it any more user friendly.

I've already tried Hammerspoon a while ago

> any arbitrary menu item in any program that exists

That's false

> I don't really know how you would make it make it any more user friendly.

Just read my comment, it tells you exactly how to make it user friendly. And it's easy to come up with a few more ideas

> That's false

In what way?

> Just read my comment, it tells you exactly how to make it user friendly.

I’ve reread all of your comments in this thread and find no such thing.

My observation too.

It is kind of evolution, just for computers.

Macs early developed good pointing devices and as a result many keyboard related aspects can afford to be somewhere between weird and crazy.

Bonus for Mac people insisting everything is fine.

And I still consider getting a MacBook Pro next month, Windows PCs are that bad even with WSL :-/

Edit: at least these days, fn and ctrl can finally be remapped and CMD-tab can be fixed so it works consistently between two Firefox (or two Safari) windows, an IDE and Finder. It used to be that I would have to CMD-tab to the Firefox group, then CMD-| to get to the correct browser window and it was one of the things that truly messed up my workdays the last time I used Mac back in 2012. (No dedicated home/end buttons and every app seemingly being free to choose what shortcut they would use for it was probably the most painful one though.)

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