IT IS EASY to see why people really love their MacBooks. These computers are sleek and run a cool operating system. I also really love my MacBook that I bought at TheCamp 2007, just from the fact that its killing me!
Where feasible I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts instead of mouse navigation, but on Mac OS X there are annoying hurdles.
On a Danish PC keyboard some the often used programming characters are accessed via the AltGr key, e.g. ‘{‘ = AltGr+7, ‘[‘ = AltGr+8, ‘]’ = AltGr+9, ‘}’ = AltGr+0. This is fine as they can all be accessible one handed.
On my MacBook I am running an English Mac OS X with a Danish keyboard and keyboard layout. The PC keyboard and MacBook keyboard differs, so it was no surprise when I could not find those characters. Tried a few combinations, then referred to the manual – no help. The Apple support forum wasn’t really that helpful either (seems that every other link is a sales or marketing page), but did find a poor swede that had some of the same problems that I had. The comments luckily mentioned that the Mac OS X shortcut for ‘[‘ is Command+shift+8.
Going from a one hand operated shortcut to a two handed is not a change for the better, but at least I could now do some programming :-)
Having found the ‘[‘ I was a happy camper as Command+[ is the shortcut for Safari 3 and Finder to do history back actions. No more grapping the mouse for doing trivial back actions I thought… but nooo. It seems that neither Safari nor Finder recognizes the key combination – aaarrgh! I speculate that this is because the true shortcut is Command+[ and what I am pressing is actually Command+shift+[. One could suspect that those programs switch on the actual keys pressed, instead of receiving characters thats been outputted from a localizing filter?
Btw. how do I enter a directory in Finder? Pressing Enter just enables me to rename the directory! WTF! This is surely a sane default action; I’ll much rather rename a directory than look whats inside – NOOOT.
Well, I’ve finally “solved” my Safari and Finder problems. A long time Mac owning friend of mine, told me that back history in Safari could also be done with Command+left-arrow. ZOMG! A secret solution?! Argh, kiss my ass Safari, I’ve installed Firefox. This new shourtcut didn’t work in Finder of course, so I installed Xfolders and then Finder could go fuck it self.
Btw. every time a dialog pops up for an action (e.g. Accept/Cancel) – how the hell do I select the desired action using the keyboard? And why do I even have to ask this question in the first place?
I would characterize the Mac OS X shortcuts as being either, very long, very non-English unfriendly or both. Wouldn’t be surprised if Mac OS X were written in Emacs by non-non-Englishmen ;-)
All this is making just me really Charles Bronson angry of how stupid Mac OS X is. Not just different, but stupid! Arrrrgh. So the lesson is short: “Apple and others – Don’t use special characters for keyboard shortcuts! It’s fubar.”
4 Comments
n8v · 2009-03-24 at 1:41
Wikipedia on Culture Shock:
Things going any better now?
BTW, Command + down arrow opens stuff in the Finder. I hate how different that is than Windows Explorer’s keyboard shortcut. And most of the time, dialog buttons are addressable with a bare key, like ‘S’ for save or whatever.
Thanks for your wp-syntax article too!
monzool · 2009-03-24 at 18:39
Well, things are better now.
I tried really hard to adapt to the secret Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts and the weird keyboard layout. Eventually I didn’t want to invest more frustrated hours in that thing, and concluded that “I’m just not Mac compatible”. So I sold it
:-/KrisBelucci · 2009-06-02 at 3:46
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for writing.
MadMud · 2009-07-03 at 6:05
Hi,
I am struggeling with similar stuff,too.
With Ukelele you can at least make your keyboard alittle more… sane. as for hotkeys I come to the same conclusion as you do they suck – hard. my hands are hurting after one day of working and I get less stuff done… iTerm helps a little with that since it replaces the more or less useless terminal app. But in the end I am wondering if I will simply replace all spps likly by X11 driven ones. When this is the case I will install Linux and be done with it. WHat good are shadows and nice slidy action when you cannot work??
Comments are closed.