Well, there are a couple of subtleties that are being addressed, that maybe need to be said better.
1) Mac keyboard shortcuts are confusing and inconsistent compared to other OSes. They're not as discoverable. Maybe this is why it seems like there are more of them or that they're harder to learn.
When I say they're confusing, I mean that they use those funky characters instead of the words Ctrl, Alt or Shift. Those characters are not on the keyboard.
When I say they're not as discoverable, I mean this: The menu system in Gnome/KDE/Win underlines the letter of the accelerator key for a menu item. This is the first type of keyboard shortcut and OS X doesn't have this at all. The other type with the key-combos is also less discoverable due to the confusing characters.
When I say it's inconsistent, I mean that a shortcut does not always exist for what you want. In Gnome/KDE/Win I can always rely on the consistency of the Alt + Menu Acclerator keys.
2) The fact that you can "hold Alt and middle click anywhere...." in Linux, I think was a testament to how Apple only offers a limited feature set; not that keyboard shortcuts are bad in general.
Ah yes, OS X keyboard shortcuts sure do have bad discoverability.
I'm in Safari, I wonder how to see page source. I click the Help menu (or Cmd-?) and type in 'source'. It finds the 'View Source' menu item. I arrow down to it and not only does it open the menu containing it, but there's a big animated blue arrow pointing at the keyboard shortcut.
And what do you know, those funky symbols are in fact printed on my keyboard. Not that I have to look at it much, because the shortcuts I use are mostly consistent between apps.
>And what do you know, those funky symbols are in fact printed on my keyboard.
Some of them are not— at least for my MacBook. The caret symbol is for the control key (think caret -> control), and the slanted-looking T is the option/alt key (if you look at the graphic as though it's a path, you can see the path takes an alternate route).
Control doesn't have the caret, but it isn't used nearly as much as Cmd/Alt/Shift for shortcuts (mostly reserved for further modified versions of other shortcuts, and Unixy stuff). As it happens, I do have a caret of sorts on my Control key as it's remapped on to Caps Lock ;)
I had no trouble learning and coming to like how keyboard shortcuts are done on the Mac, and that's because I didn't consider my previous environment the authoritative way to use a computer just because I used it first. (See also users obsessed with maximising every window because that was the done thing on a 15" CRT)
The US keyboard is weird. The German keyboard also has the bathtub and a symbol on the shift key (also on tab), also symbols on the enter and return keys. No caret for shift, though.
...that's pretty slick but the discoverability on Windows is still better
first..you'd have to know to think about what the feature is named...
...on Windows...you can invoke any menu by pressing ALT and then the first letter of the menu or a designated letter on a menu option (or you can use the arrows)...all windows menus get this behavior by default, in addition to separate keyboard shortcuts that can also be defined in the application
...you can get to the menus on Macs through a rather inconvenient combo CTRL-F2 (CTRL-FN-F2 on Macbooks)...but you can only arrow through commands, there are no letter shortcuts in that case.
...I like OS X, but this is one area that Windows does much better (that and multiple monitors)...
What I understand you're saying is that the keyboard shortcuts may typically be more efficient to perform in Windows. That could be true but it's a different topic from discoverability, where straight up full text search is better than collision hampered and segmented expansion of menus.
Beyond the basics (cut/copy/paste/new/save/quit/...), there's a fair chance we don't know which sub-menu the function we're searching for resides in (and shouldn't have to care).
...good point, the point I was trying to make was not so much the discoverability of the FEATURE (I do agree with your points there)...but of discoverability of the SHORTCUT to the feature, which is what you referred to as efficiency.
the fact that I (and apparently many others) learned about some OS X keyboard shortcuts through reading this thread indicates that there is still a problem with "discoverability"
Yeah, see, Mac keyboard equivalents actually predate most other OSes. So no, they're not going to change to accomodate the newcomers. option- shift- and command- arrows have been there since the 80s. Not going to change because Windows decided to do it differently.
As for discoverability, it is worse today, but historically there were no keyboard equivalents that were not in the menus (by Apple's UI guidelines), so discoverability was better on the Mac.
Um, have you ever actually used a Mac? Like, since 1987 or so?
Mac keyboard shortcuts are:
1) Not confusing at all, the common ones date back decades and are largely similar to other platforms.
2) No, they don't use "funky characters". Command is a word. Do you have difficulty recognizing what "Command-S" means for save, or "Command-P" for print, etc?
3) I beg to differ. Command, control and option are on the keyboard.
4) Just a detail, but: "Ctrl" and "Alt" are not words. Just so you know.
I tend to agree, but working out how to move a cursor around text, with various combinations of either character by character, or word by word, or to the beginning or end of the line, and either selecting or not selecting text, was pretty frustrating.
3) My keyboard has [fn][ctrl][alt][cmd][space][cmd][alt], there's no [option].
I always thought that the text shortcuts are intuitive and easy to remember. Shortcuts you are used to are always going to be easier to remember than new ones – that is always going to distort your view. I wouldn’t put to much weight on that.
You navigate text using the arrow keys on their own (characters and lines) or with one of two modifiers: Alt (words and paragraphs) and Command (lines and text fields). If you use no modifiers you are moving around one character (left, right) or line (up, down) at a time. Alt allows you to move from word to word (left, right) or paragraph to paragraph (up, down). Command navigates to the beginning and end of the line (left, right) or text field (up, down). As you can see there is a clear and straightforward hierarchy.
People are already used to using the arrow keys to navigate text. The modifier keys do nothing more than what they are supposed to do: The arrow keys still do similar stuff than before, it’s only slightly modified. This is an excellent example of picking awesome keyboard shortcuts.
You can add Shift to any of those combinations to select instead of just moving the cursor. Command-Left moves the cursor the the beginning of the line, Command-Shift-Left selects everything between the current position of the cursor and the beginning of the line.
Shift is used for selecting things everywhere, no matter the OS. OS X definitely picks the right modifier for selecting text and everything is still consistent with moving around in text. Anyone who knows how to move around in text can easily be taught how to select text: It’s exactly the same, only with Shift.
If you use Backspace and Delete (which is Fn-Backspace on keyboards without the Delete key) together with Alt or Command you can delete words or lines respectively (as you would expect).
Again, OS X remains consistent. Backspace and Delete work with exactly the same modifiers in exactly the same way as the arrow keys. This behavior is once again easy to teach.
This all seems crystal clear to me and I’m loving it very much. I think all the key combinations make intuitive sense.
I hope I could also explain why I think that OS X is so consistent and intuitive in this regard.
You do a nice job of explaining it, and I am grateful to you. Now that you lay it out it does seem a lot more consistent than I thought.
My only minor gripe (and this is cross OS, with many softwares and keyboards) is that it's harder for touch typists to use. Compare any shortcuts that require you to take your hands from the home keys with, eg, the shortcuts provided by Wordstar.
Should I upload a picture of my Macbook Pro keyboard? Because the funky characters are not on there. Just the words, Fn, Control and Alt/Option. Command is the only one that has a symbol as well as a word.
1) Mac keyboard shortcuts are confusing and inconsistent compared to other OSes. They're not as discoverable. Maybe this is why it seems like there are more of them or that they're harder to learn.
When I say they're confusing, I mean that they use those funky characters instead of the words Ctrl, Alt or Shift. Those characters are not on the keyboard.
When I say they're not as discoverable, I mean this: The menu system in Gnome/KDE/Win underlines the letter of the accelerator key for a menu item. This is the first type of keyboard shortcut and OS X doesn't have this at all. The other type with the key-combos is also less discoverable due to the confusing characters.
When I say it's inconsistent, I mean that a shortcut does not always exist for what you want. In Gnome/KDE/Win I can always rely on the consistency of the Alt + Menu Acclerator keys.
2) The fact that you can "hold Alt and middle click anywhere...." in Linux, I think was a testament to how Apple only offers a limited feature set; not that keyboard shortcuts are bad in general.