- Apple has that stupid custom COMMAND button, just like Windows has their stupid custom START and MENU buttons. It wouldn't be so bad if I could ignore it or use it in place of ALT, but it's used in most of the keyboard shortcuts, and the placement of the ALT and COMMAND keys on a connected keyboard is exactly reversed from the laptop keyboard. I'm afraid I'll have to remap the keys whenever I connect my keyboard. Ug. I would love a good solution to this one.
- Speaking of buttons, why doesn't the default keyboard have DELETE, HOME, END, PAGE-UP, and PAGE-DOWN? I'll live since they usually work on my connected keyboard, but I emphasize "usually": for example, the HOME and END buttons do nothing as I'm writing this post in my browser. Great... do I start learning Mac shortcuts for those?
- Depending on the focus, keyboard shortcuts for enclosing windows don't fire. For example, in Safari, if my cursor is in a text box, then I cannot switch to the next tab using my keyboard. I get the same behavior in Eclipse... I just get stuck if my cursor isn't in just the right place. Ouch.
- I often want to resize a window by grabbing it's border on, say, the left side... or somewhere besides the bottom-right corner.
- It's hard to navigate through the menu bar. To get into a menu, I have to get to the menu bar, then type the first letter of the desired menu, then hit ENTER; on my other systems, one key combination will take me to the desired menu (eg. ALT+F for the "File" menu).
- The menu bar contains many different sections: app operations, services, time, the Apple menu. Why can't I separate them out and put the time where I'm accustomed to seeing it?
- Any why does the menu bar always have to be at the top? I'm accustomed to accessing system applications (eg. services) on the bottom. Also, I put my dual screens on top of one another... luckily I can configure the menu bar to go at the top of my second monitor, or I would have been outright pissed (since it would have been in the middle of both screens).
I admit to being a Mac newbie, so I appreciate if you know any solutions that help with this stuff. (But if you're going to say that I should buy a Mac keyboard or learn The Mac Way, please realize that I'll always do development work on some of my own machines where I run Linux (and I regularly hop on other people's Windows machines), so totally converting myself to the proprietary Mac approach isn't very attractive.)
Maybe I'm the wrong audience for this thing!?
1 comment:
My biggest annoyance programming on a Mac is your second point: the Home and End keys. There is a way to remap them so they behave like every other operating system on the planet, but I have yet to find a solution that actually works system-wide.
Google Chrome behaves largely like Windows and Linux in these regards, including Home/End, Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, etc. I like it MUCH better than Safari.
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